


State of Emergency

by twnkwlf



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Angst with a Happy Ending, Car Accidents, EMT Derek, Emergency Medical Technicians, Emergency Response, Firefighter Scott, Hero Worship, Hurt/Comfort, I'm tagging both because some people might not know the difference!, M/M, PTSD, Paramedic Derek Hale, Police Officer Stiles Stilinski, Touch-Starved, Touch-Starved Derek
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-19
Updated: 2017-04-25
Packaged: 2018-08-31 08:41:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8571787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twnkwlf/pseuds/twnkwlf
Summary: “I guess I’m just going to have to flirt with the hot paramedic from now on. He’s a buzzkill, but he’s easy on the eyes, right?”Derek looks up and raises his eyebrows at the cop who gives him a knowing smirk. It’s then that he finally registers the name tag on his uniformed chest, right above his heart. It says S. Stilinski.“Officer Stilinski,” Derek starts, fighting to keep his face serious. “That is workplace sexual harassment.”“What’d I tell you?” He shakes his head softly back and forth, like he’s proud that Derek said anything not related to blood pressure and wounds. “Total buzzkill.”





	1. all these accidents that happen

**Author's Note:**

> who's a piece of shit? this girl 
> 
> i'm so painfully aware of the seventeen thousand half-abandoned sterek wips stacking up in my works, but i just really wanted to keep writing this story so i'm gonna try to do that because it's been haunting me for so long. really. it calls my name at night. i open my laptop and BAM it's on the screen, waiting for me, THREATENing me 
> 
> anyway babes here's some feelings and porn. i'm workin on more 
> 
> (ALSO this has been written so far while listening to georgia kay's cover of a bjork song called joga and that's where the title comes from)

The scene is a brutal collision—one semi-transport and a tiny silver Kia that has rolled all the way to the edge of the road, back end totally destroyed, and the rest of it crushed against the guardrail. Isaac parks the ambulance as close as they can get for safety.

Everything is sharp in the late night air, clear and organized chaos. Quiet chaos. It’s midnight at a deserted intersection and the world is silent except for the distant sirens of the impending fire trucks. Up ahead of the wreckage, Derek sees the flashing blue and red lights of a cop car parked sideways, blocking the intersection from further oncoming traffic.

Seven years on the job and nights like this tend to blur into each other, but there’s something about this one accident, at this particular intersection, this particular emergency. It weighs heavy like a brick siting in his stomach. It has him looking around at everything, trying to mark the details in his memory like a carving.

For the time being, Isaac grabs a kit and jogs over to the transport truck driver. He is alive and well. He stands outside his rig with both hands over his mouth, keeping a distance from the upturned Kia. There’s scrap metal scattered across the concrete—a piece of the truck’s grill, some shiny glass from a busted headlight.  The skid marks aren’t as stark in at night as they will be, come the morning. A police woman with brown hair and sharp brows stands next to the driver with her notepad out, nodding and putting her hand on his shoulder. Isaac will assess him for injuries and shock, but Derek won’t be surprised if the guy walks away from this without a scratch.

Derek will be surprised if the other driver makes it out of this alive.

He approaches the side of the car with bated breath and a tense stomach. Dispatch said there was one injured female, alive, but whatever state she’s in is a mystery. There could be carnage, blood and limbs, and brain matter. He wonders if it’s a good thing to not hear any screaming, or if it means something worse. He takes a deep breath as he rounds the back end, but the first thing he sees is another cop lying belly down next to the upturned vehicle. “Paramedics are right here Debbie. Fire team’s right behind them,” he’s saying.

The driver’s side is crushed against the rail, where they have no good access to get inside and asses her injuries. Instead, Derek is forced to mirror the cop and lie with his stomach to the asphalt, peering in through the passenger window alongside him. The officer has a flashlight shining onto the driver who is upside down, bent unnaturally into the dashboard and slipping from her seatbelt. He’s holding her hand.  

“Her pulse is a steady 70,” the cop says quietly without looking at Derek. “She can breathe, but it’s painful. She was unconscious when we arrived, woke up about ten minutes ago.”  His voice drops to a bare whisper when he adds, “Let’s not scare her.”

“Debbie can you tell me if you have any numbness or loss of feeling?” Derek says, looking in.  

The woman doesn’t say anything, just lets out a shaky groan that’s full of fear. Beside him, the cop shifts and presses his head closer into the wreckage, coming right against the broken glass of the window. “Debbie, baby, are you still with me?”

“Yes,” she gasps, sobbing. “I’m here.”

“Good, because we were having such a good talk before this wet blanket showed up, right?”  She makes a noise that’s considerably less terrified. “Look, I know we were trying to get to our happy place a few minutes ago, but it’s really important that you answer the shitty questions, okay?” His voice is mellow, apologetic, but he doesn’t sound serious. He makes it seem as though all this is more of an inconvenience than life or death.  

“I-I-I don’t know if my legs are hurting or just… I can’t tell.” Debbie takes a shuddering breath as she tries to wiggle herself to the left, toward the cop. She gasps in pain.

“Don’t try to move,” Derek says with more harshness than he’d meant. He really is a wet blanket.

“Yeah, you just stay still as a statue, Debbs,” the cop reiterates.

“I won’t move. I won’t move.”   

The cop nods and spares a quick side glance at Derek.  He’s young, but not a rookie. He seems like an old pro, a seasoned officer who has done this sort of thing hundreds of times. This scene should be panicked and messy. It should be tense and dark, and full of pain and suffering, but down here next to the wreckage, it’s almost peaceful. It’s mesmerising.

“Hey Debbs,” the cop says. “With you being a lawyer and all, do you watch that show, _The Good Wife?_ Do lawyers even like legal dramas? Or is it just like taking your work home with you. Me, personally, I’m a sucker for a buddy cop movie.”  

It takes Debbie a few seconds to form a proper sentence. The car creaks—the aftershock of the wreck, and a few shards of glass fall away from the already totaled back window. “My kids like…they like _How to Get Away with Murder_ better _.”_

“Oh no way, I have that queued up on Netflix right now. We should get together and watch it sometime, you know? Netflix and chill, as the kids say.”

“You’re just-just trying to distract me, aren’t you?” Debbie says with chattering teeth. She’s shivering and in shock.  

“Hey, if I was trying to distract you, I’d take my shirt off.”

The moments after stretch on agonizingly as they wait for the fire team to arrive with the Jaws of Life. They can’t reach far enough in at this angle to even supply her with oxygen. They can’t get inside the car with the way the door has crumpled in. There’s nothing they can do.

Derek stands up from the asphalt when he hears the close approaching sirens of the second ambulance and the firetruck not far behind. After a few seconds, he recognizes Erica when she parks it close as well, leaving room for the other responders. She jogs to meet Derek as Boyd runs around to the back to get the gurney.

“What do we got?” she asks, scanning the entire scene behind him.

“Middle aged female, I’d say 180 lbs. Head contusion, but no sign of brain trauma so far. I think it’s fair to say her ribs are broken. Spinal injury. We can’t know until they get her out of there.”

“Traffic was bad coming from the fire hall. It’s taking longer than usual,” Erica says, sighing into her hand. “How’s the truck driver?”

“Isaac’s checking him over now. He’s taking his statement. You and Boyd should get him to emerge’ first.”

It takes another two and a half minutes for the fire team to finally arrive on scene. All the while, the cop continues to talk steadily. Derek watches from afar, listens to the sound of the man’s voice like it’s background music on the radio. He fills the tense air with effortless conversation. It isn’t forced or placating.

When finally, the two firemen pry the passenger door from the car, the cop has to get up and out of the way. Debbie panics.

“Don’t leave me,” she cries. “You can’t, you can’t! Please don’t!

The cop, now standing next to Isaac and the gurney, drops back down on his knees to her eye level. “I’m right here, I’m right here,” he says clearly and surely. “I’m not going anywhere. You and me are taking a road trip together to the ER, I promise.”

“Okay,” she says over and over. “Okay, okay, okay.”

Getting her out is even more agonizing. He’s sure that she has several broken ribs, maybe a cracked collarbone. There’s a jagged cut down her sternum and she screams bloody murder when they carefully lift her out of the wreck and set her on the gurney. The officer soothes her with deep breaths and gentle mumblings that Derek can’t make out while he fastens her in with the buckles and Isaac secures the brace. She calms down and her heartbeat levels out as she breathes evenly.

“Let’s get going,” he says to Isaac and the cop. The officer takes a look at him, nodding, taking a silent breath deep into his lungs. He really is young.  He has bright brown eyes, even in the dark. They catch on everything and give life to night, and Derek would be hooked on them if they didn’t have a life to save. He looks away, embarrassed for staring, as they climb into the back of the ambulance. The cop leans into his shoulder to speak into the radio.

“Car twenty-four reporting, dispatch. Officer Tate is still on scene. I’m en route to…”

Derek stops listening as he relays the message to his station, intermittent with the phonetic alphabet and number codes. He works fast on securing the patient’s vitals while applying minimal pressure to the cut on her chest. Debbie answers all his questions with a steady voice. She has back pain and some tingling in her left leg, but she can feel everything below the waist, amazingly.  

She’s hurt, but stable. It’s a fifteen minute drive to the nearest hospital and after six minutes, there’s nothing left to do but to watch her pulse and keep her lucid. The cop helps with that.

“I see you’ve got a pretty sweet wedding band on that finger. So what’s your husband going to think about all this flirting between the two of us, huh?”

“My husband” she says, cracking a smile as much as she can with the neck brace pushing on her chin. She’s stopped shivering now and is staying calm as they swerve through traffic toward safety, the sirens echoing from the outside. “would say you’re too young.”

“Oh, Debbs you’re breaking my heart,” he says, clutching his chest. His other hand is still firmly holding hers. “I guess I’m just going to have to flirt with the hot paramedic from now on. He’s a buzzkill, but he’s easy on the eyes, right?”

Derek looks up and raises his eyebrows at the cop who gives him a knowing smirk. It’s then that he finally registers the name tag on his uniformed chest, right above his heart. It says _S. Stilinski._

“Officer Stilinski,” Derek starts, fighting to keep his face serious. “That is workplace sexual harassment.”

“What’d I tell you?” He shakes his head softly back and forth, like he’s proud that Derek said anything not related to blood pressure and wounds. “Total buzzkill.”  

Debbie chuckles, despite herself, but groans after, probably from the rib injury. “For a couple of guys standing over a dying lady,” she pauses to catch her breath, fighting through the sharp stab of pain. “You sure crack a lot of jokes.”  

Officer Stilinski leans forward with his hand outstretched. He softly smooths the matted hair from her forehead, into her line of vision. “Don’t be so dramatic,” he tells her. It’s not cavalier. It’s not condescending. It’s sincere and gentle.  “You’re going to be just fine.”

***

Later in the evening when Derek is filling his paperwork out at the hospital, he wanders further beyond triage with the clip board in hand, almost aimlessly. It’s the middle of the night now, something like two or three in the morning, but he’s wired, thinking about going for a run with the dogs when he gets home, or organizing the cabinets, or writing an entire fucking novel in one go.

He isn’t paying attention to his surroundings when he hears a voice call out, “hey!” behind him.

Officer Stilinski is sitting on one of the emergency beds in a white t-shirt, uniform shirt thrown aside. He’s holding up a bloody elbow that’s mostly dried and scabbed over, but fresh.  “Can you help me out here?” he asks Derek. “The nurses are slammed.”

“I shouldn’t really give you medical attention when you’re on hospital grounds.”

“Well, I won’t tell if you won’t,” he says, but it comes out sounding less playful and more irritated. “Come on, man, all I need is some wet wipes and a band aid.”

The cut isn’t that bad. He doesn’t need stitching.  Derek could probably grab a few iodine wipes and gauze pads, and send him on his way, but he approaches the bed and slips on a pair of latex gloves instead. Stilinski looks like he wants to crack another inappropriate joke, but he lets the moment pass when Derek gently takes the other man’s arm and turns it over. The maroon of dried blood looks vibrant on his pale skin.

“Is this from the glass?” he asks.

“Yeah. Didn’t really notice it until now.” He shrugs as though it’s absolutely nothing and it probably is to him. Derek idly wonders what other scars he has under the uniform, his brain fogging with the jarring fantasies of pale naked skin. As he reaches for the iodine out of the supply drawer, he tries to think of something to say that won’t sound like hero worship. He’s been replaying the last few hours in his head since the doctors wheeled Debbie into surgery. He’s been wondering why it feels like he just saw a miracle when nothing miraculous really happened. Eventually, he says, “you were really great with the patient. With Debbie, I mean.”

“She was in okay shape. She just needed some reassurance.”

“No it was—“ Derek starts, tearing the iodine wipe and shaking his head to find the words. Stilinski cuts him off.

“I’m just doing my job, man.” He _is_ irritated. Tired, probably. The bravado he’d had at the site of the accident has bled out and dried up like the cut on his arm. He hisses when Derek blots the wipe down the wound. “Just like you were doing yours.”  

“It wasn’t your job to hold her hand in the ambulance.”

“It’s not _your_ job to bandage me up ‘ _on hospital grounds_ ,’ yet here we are.”

He doesn’t want to badger the guy, or force the compliment, if that’s what this is. Derek doesn’t know what he’s trying to say. He just thinks that there is something different about Stilinski and there was something different about the energy in the back of that ambulance. He’s never laughed in there while the sirens were on.

Stilinski sighs as Derek throws the pad into the biohazard waste and moves to bandage him up. It’s quiet for a few moments except for the distant sound of chatter and movement from the ER floor, and the nursing station paging on the overhead. Derek focuses on the sound of the officer’s breath.

“What’s your name?” the cop finally asks.

“It’s Derek.”

Stilinski shakes his arm a little when Derek finishes taping him up and steps away. Standing from the bed in a hop, he starts to slip his uniform back over the white undershirt, fingers deftly buttoning. He looks up at Derek and tells him, “Derek, I try to _live in the moment,_ you know? And that moment back there with the scared mom and the fractured spine? That moment required holding her hand in the ambulance.” He sniffs and adjusts his belt, and Derek notices the gun on his hip for the first time. “Thanks for the bandage,” he adds, softer.  

Derek doesn’t say anything. He meekly slips his hands into his pockets and moves aside so Stilinski can leave the small medical quarters. He starts to walk away, but turns and strides backward to tell Derek, “For the record, you were great with her too. Doctors said she’ll walk and everything.”

He’s gone before Derek can remember to ask for his first name.

***

The next time they see each other, it’s through a plume of smoke.

On the scale of things, this call was miniscule. The restaurant that went up was closed for the day, thankfully. Only the owner and his son were on the site, and both escape with no injury, just a bit of smoke inhalation and a lot of insurance paperwork.

For Derek, it’s not miniscule. Fire never is.

He’s riding with Boyd tonight, who gives him an apologetic look when they get the call. He lets Boyd take the reins on the response, feeling too edgy to do anything other than drive the ambulance without crashing it. He keeps his focus on other things at the scene, but flashes of orange lick into his line of sight and the _sound_ of cracking wood and whooshing combustion has him disoriented. He hangs back as far as possible while the fire team works to put it out.  Now, at the end of his shift, there is anxiety hiding in the crevices of his body and he can’t look up at the charred, smoking remains of the restaurant.

Normally, he’d be rushing to get out of here, away from the scene, but Derek catches sight of Stilinski and his partner, the woman with severe eyebrows that Derek recognizes from the car accident. They stand with one of the firefighters talking while the rest of the fire team packs up behind them.

Everyone is sluggish now, winding down and waiting for the site to be closed off by the yellow tape, and for the traffic to resume as normal. Derek stands off to the side of the ambulance, listening in on the conversation while trying to appear like he’s doing something useful.   

“It was pasta,” the fireman is saying to the two cops. “They left a pot of alfredo on the stove. I hate alfredo.”

“Scott, I have personally seen you put away three bowls of Kira’s chicken alfredo in less than fifteen minutes” Stilinski says, smiling.

“I know,” Scott sighs while he pulls off his oversized fireproof gloves. “But this is the second pasta-related fire we’ve been called out for in two weeks. I don’t get. Pasta is supposed to be easy to make.”

“That’s true. I mean, you and me managed to not burn down our whole dorm cooking mac and cheese in the microwave _for all of freshmen year.”_

“Aren’t these people are supposed to be chefs? They’re idiots,” the female cop says. “All of them.”

“Hey now, Malia,” Stilinski chides, putting his hand on her shoulder. “Not everyone takes the amount of risk management courses we do.”

Stilinski looks up then, noticing Derek as he hovers. The corners of his mouth quirk in amusement and Derek’s cheeks get horrifically hot under his attention. He winks at him as Malia answers a call on her phone, stepping out of ear shot.

“Lieutenant, we’re rolling out in five!” A younger firefighter calls out to Scott from the side of the first firetruck, and Scott waves back. Derek is a little surprised that the kid calls him Lieutenant. He’s young and stalky, with smudges of char on his cheek and a soft expression that doesn’t offer any kind of brute authority. He watches with curiosity as Scott and Stilinski exchange a well-practiced handshake goodbye, like old friends, and then as the Lieutenant climbs aboard the beastly red firetruck, which gives a curt honk farewell to the scene as it rolls away.

Derek sits back on the edge of the ambulance and fidgets with his hands. He can feel the police officer walking toward him, see the blurry black outline of his torso in his peripheral vison.

“Fancy seeing you here,” Stilinski says. Derek looks up.

“This is an emergency. I’m an emergency responder.” He hopes it doesn’t sound cold. He doesn’t know how to pull off sarcasm without blurring the line between mean and light hearted. Just ask Cora. “I never got your name,” he tries after a moment of silence.

“It’s Stiles.” He sticks his hand out. Derek wishes to know Stiles well enough that they have their own hand shake, their own secrets and rituals. Derek leans in like it’s an instinct, and Stiles is still gripping his hand.

“I didn’t see you around the action very much,” he says. It’s not an accusation, but it feels like one to Derek.

He doesn’t tell the officer that he’d spent most of this afternoon hiding in the rig, doing inane tasks to pass the time before they were cleared to leave the scene. “I was working back here.”

The sun has almost fully set now. The streetlights overhead start to cast long yellow beams across the wet pavement, making them glisten. He can almost feel the knot in his stomach shrinking size and his jaw loosening, but the air still stinks of acrid smoke and metallic hydrant water. So instead, he looks up at Stiles and feels a confession pressing hard against his throat. “I don’t like fire,” he tells him.

Stiles could brush that off and say something like, “ _who does_?” but he frowns, doesn’t ask for an explanation. Derek looks down at his hands and feels Stiles move to sit next to him, feels the weight press the ambulance down on its tires as he adjusts himself, lets his feet dangle off the edge to mirror Derek. His shoulder is warm against Derek’s, but neither of them move to make space.

“I don’t like it when there’s kids,” he tells him. Derek reads something on his face, something like a memory coming back to haunt. “I mean, I love kids. You know, babysitting and playing with Lego and shit. They’re great, but… but on the job. When there’s kids involved in all this.” He gestures at the shadowy, burned restaurant behind them. “I’m not good with that. I lose my shit.”

Derek takes a long look at him, shaking his head. “I can’t really picture that, somehow.”

“Dude, I’m new in town. You’ve only seen the _good cop_ version of me.”

Derek wants to streamline him a thousand questions, but he starts with, “so where did you come from?”

“San Francisco PD for a while. I thought coming back here might slow things down for me.” He gives Derek a glance that might as well be behind a mask, unsure and hiding something, pushing air out fast “But… if there’s one thing that’s for sure, it’s that fucked up things happen everywhere.”

Derek raises his eyebrows, a thousand incidents pouring through his memory. Murders and violent assaults. Hit and runs and drunk drivers. Children without heartbeats in the back of the ambulance. Body bags and weeping families. Arson. “What was so bad in San Francisco?”

Stiles shrugs. “I guess I just…” He looks at his own hands as well, mirroring Derek in a way, like he’s just as shy. “I guess there’s actually _two things_ that are for sure in this job.”

“What’s that?”

“No matter how hard you try, you can’t save everyone.”

***

The time after that, it’s not an emergency, unless you count finding something to wear that Erica approves of as a life-or-death situation, which it might as well be.

“Do you not own a single shirt that isn’t blue or grey?” she says, plucking at his t-shirt dangerously close to the nipple.

“No,” he says flatly.

It’s a rare Friday night where they all have an open schedule. They’ve met at the local dive a few doors down from the fire hall. The place is always loud with tired firefighters fresh off their shifts. An ever present jukebox sits in the back with a music selection that hasn’t been updated since 1998, and the near constant admonitions from the crusty bartender named Harris stand out amid the white noise of Alanis Morrissett and drunken chatter. The walls are lined with memorabilia from generations of firefighters—old chief hats and group photos dating back to the 60’s when this bar was opened. It’s been the unofficial fireman’s bar since then.

Boyd, Isaac and Erica occupy the booth in the back, the usual spot which they’ve practically carved their names onto.  Derek was fashionably late meeting them, also like usual. It takes a great deal of social motivation to go anywhere except jogging in the park on Friday nights, knowing that going out means Erica will undoubtedly try to drag him to the clubs later, when they’re both drunk.   

Sitting down across from Isaac, who is texting, and he immediately pours a glass from the pitcher they’ve ordered, thinks about going home to finish the new season of House of Cards with his dogs. Deep in his heart, or whatever you call it, Derek loves his friends. Being around them is just exhausting most of the time.

He’s walked in on a very productive conversation about Boyd’s Tinder profile. Erica has his iPhone in her clutches, eyes squinting in concentration as she taps the screen like a professional. “Trust me—don’t put a selfie as your first photo. Start with group pictures. It shows that you’re social and not a narcissist. Next, ease them in with the bathroom mirror pic, and then…” She taps her finger and sits back to admire the careful selection of pictures. “Seal the deal with the lip biting selfie.”

 She’s added a snapshot of the four of them as Boyd’s main profile photo. It was taken by a co-worker with a nice camera while they were on shift last year.

“Let me see,” Isaac says, snatching Boyd’s phone. “Jesus, we look like the brochure cover for the Paramedic program at Beacon Hills Community College.”

“We look sexy and uniformed, Isaac.” Erica tosses her hair behind her shoulder and steals the phone back.

“Thank you for the constructive criticism,” Boyd says, rolling his eyes. “But I’m going with the lip biting selfie.”

“All the times I’ve gotten you laid and you still don’t trust me?” She throws back the last of here beer. “Maybe you _are_ a narcissist.”

Derek chuckles, pointing a finger at Erica. “Pot calling the kettle black.”  

She rolls her eyes, looking off beyond Derek’s shoulder for a moment. She perks up shoving Boyd in the shoulder. “Look, look, it’s that new cop.”  

Derek can’t help but whip his head to the side to look over to the bar. Stiles’ sharp profile jumps out at him in the crowd of firefighters and random people. He’s ordering a beer, tapping rhythmically on the surface of the bar. It’s the first time Derek’s seen him without a uniform. He studies him for a frantic moment, well aware that he’s staring.

Stiles notices after about five seconds, turning his head, meeting his eyes across the bar. And then he makes his way over, because of course he does. From this close, Derek can read the faded print of the Deadpool t-shirt he’s wearing, worn and stretching across his shoulders.

“Okay, now I can say it— _fancy seeing you here_ ,” he says when he’s close, just before tipping his beer back. Derek watches the column of his throat move as he swallows.

“Not that fancy,” he says, gesturing around them. There’s singing fish mounted to the wall above their booth.

Stiles shrugs, his eyes shining with amusement, but then focuses his attention the others at the booth, all of whom look like they’re witnessing a modern miracle. He can’t blame them. Derek doesn’t talk to anyone but them most days. Stiles effortlessly eases the awkward moment by asking, “You’re Erica, right? We had that bike accident out on the Parkway a few weeks ago.”

“Oh, I remember you. You’re the freshest meat Beacon Hills PD has seen in ages.”

“ _Erica,”_ Derek says on a sigh.

Stiles barks out a laugh, that makes his whole face expand and bright up the dim mood lighting. “It’s true, though. Seriously. My Lieutenant nicknamed me and my partner _the Toddlers_. We’re the only ones without grandchildren on the force.”

“Well,” Erica starts. She folds her hands conspiratorially and leans forward. “Maybe you can give us a fresh perspective. If you were a girl on Tinder—”

“Or a guy on Grindr?” Stiles interjects. Derek nearly chokes on his second beer and Erica nods, moving on.

“Or a guy on Grindr— would you be more likely to swipe right on a picture of a dude in a sexy Paramedic uniform, or a grainy lip-biting selfie with a tacky Instagram filter?”

“I’m more of an abs shot guy myself,” Stiles says, smirking.

“The world has bigger conflicts to solve than this one, Erica,” says Boyd, who has pocketed his phone and started getting up from the booth. “And I just got a date with a girl at the bar up the street, so I’m about to bounce.”

“The lip biting selfie won,” Isaac says, putting his hand on Erica’s shoulder. “Please move on.”

Erica, annoyed, announces that she and Isaac are going to get tequila shots and change the music from Jagged Little Pill, which has started to repeat the song “Ironic” for a third time.  She wiggles her eyebrows very suggestively and without a hint of subtlety. It leaves Derek and Stiles at the both in a sudden wash of silence. Stiles sits next to him instead of across, like some kind of habit. He’s always next to him—lying on the concrete surrounded by glass, sitting on the edge of the ambulance.

“You know it really is fancy seeing you here,” Stiles says. “Scott told me to meet him, but he cancelled. I was about to leave.”

“It’s a small town. We couldn’t avoid each other if we tried.”

“Who said anything about avoidance? Maybe I was actually _trying_ to find you.”

Derek’s insides feel like squirming worms about to burst out of his body. He swirls the last bit of beer around his glass, looking down at it. “Why would you do that?”

“Well,” Stiles says, jerking his head in the direction of Erica and Isaac who are both slamming their empty shot glasses down on the bar while Harris side eyes them. “You clearly are friends with the most interesting people in this town.”

“Yeah I’m, uh,” Derek starts, scratching at his beard. Maybe he should have shaved. Maybe he should have bought some shirts that aren’t blue or grey. “Sorry about Erica. She can be kind of—“

“Kind of a meddler?” He leans his head back, resting it against the red leather of the upholstery. His skin jumps out at Derek, the moles on his neck more noticeable at such a close distance and underneath the low hanging lamp. “You’ve clearly never met Lydia Martin.”  

“Erica is…a well-intentioned wingman. But I think she tends to scare off most of Boyd and Isaac’s prospects.”

“And what about your prospects?” Stiles tries, raising an eyebrow.

Derek has never wanted to kiss someone more than he does in this moment. It makes his jaw ache and his chest expand. He tells Stiles, “She hasn’t scared you off yet.”

Stiles’ casual smile drops and so do his eyes. He stares at Derek’s lips. Derek stares at his. The moment lingers on and there’s absolutely nothing else to say except for when Stiles’ voice, low and almost coarse, asks him, “Do you want to get the fuck out of here?”

***

The next time is twenty-six minutes and one cab ride later.

“Your place is nice,” he tells Derek as he enters the kitchen. He bends down to greet the dogs, who lap and jump at him, full of energy from not being walked in hours. Derek doesn’t have a lot of things that fill his free time, and they’re used to being led around the neighborhood most nights. They’re not used to people being inside the house. Derek isn’t used to it either. Oden, Derek’s white lab, nearly knocks Stiles to the floor, but Derek reaches out and catches his elbow, dragging him back up.

“Sorry. They get excited around strangers.”

Stiles gives him a funny look. “You have a point, sort of.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know, I’m still basically a stranger. I don’t really know anything about you.”

His brain scrambles for purchase. It’s like he can hear a miniaturized version of Erica’s voice calling at him, _SAY SOMETHING, STUPID, DO YOU NOT HAVE A PERSONALITY?_  Pathetically, “I have two dogs,” is what he manages to come up with.

“I think I knew that,” Stiles says, gently swatting Zoomer, the large American Bulldog, when she tries to lick at his palm.

“What else do you want to know?” Derek bites the inside of his cheek. Does he want to know what Derek does with his free time? Would Stiles care to know that Derek spends every day like the rest, that the only thing keeping him from drowning in the monotony of his routine is the change from day shift to night shift? Would Stiles run away if he knew that Derek is defined by work and loneliness and not much else?

Stiles half-heartedly chuckles, crosses his arms, and leans back against the kitchen counter that Derek wishes he’d cleaned more thoroughly. “I don’t know. What’s your family like?”

He thinks for what feels like a long time, turning over memories and incorrect adjectives that he could use to tell the story of the great and tragic Hale family. The thing is, it’s what defines Derek. Stiles might as well just ask him “Who are you, Derek Hale, as a person? What is your soul like?” He can’t get the words out, can’t look at this practical stranger and describe it. So again, painstakingly, he gestures to the Oden and Zoomer who have stopped physically harassing Stiles and moved onto pining for him on the floor with big, sad eyes.

“I’ve had Oden since he was a puppy. But I got Zoomer last year. She belonged to this guy we responded to on the highway. She was in the car with him when they crashed. He didn’t make it out, so… I brought her home.” Stiles doesn’t look at him like he’s an idiot, or like he’s confused at all. He bends down and pets Zoomer on head until she’s thumping her tail back and forth, closing her eyes and leaning into Stiles’ scratching fingers. Derek idly thinks about being in her place, having those hands buried deep in his hair, and he wishes it was less creepy and embarrassing. 

After a couple of moments, and with him looking away, it feels safer telling him, “I have a little sister, but that’s it.” And it’s all Derek can really say right now.

Even if it feels like there’s a possibility, a glimmer of some future where he could unzip the coat of armor from his skin and just bleed out the past for Stiles. It’s not now.

 “We should watch a movie,” Stiles says suddenly, standing up. “Something cheesy. How ‘bout it?”

And just like that, the air smooths out again. It’s like a miracle, like a superpower, how Stiles always knows what to say, what to do, how to react to tension. He can cut it like it’s made of nothing but air and leave you feeling weightless and unbound. Derek’s chest aches at the feeling, at the relief and the admiration mixing dangerously there. He wants to kiss Stiles and it feels like if he did, he’d be cut loose from gravity.

They put on a really shitty Sarah Jessica Parker romantic comedy in Derek’s living room, settling into the sofa with the dogs underfoot. With every scene, Stiles leans into Derek’s side more and more. About half way through, they give up the pretense and Stiles sits with his back to Derek’s side, his head propped onto Derek’s chest, curling himself in a little. He’s full of jokes, sourly tearing into Matthew McConaughey’s performance, making Derek laugh warmly, pulling easy conversation out of thin air. A rock climbing scene reminds him of a trip he took with Scott two years ago in Colorado. A song in the background is something he knows how to play on the drums.

The weight of him supresses the nervousness chewing Derek’s his insides. By the end of the movie, he has his arm draped around Stiles, hand resting over his chest, and as the credits roll, Stiles reaches up and holds Derek’s hand where it rests there. He examines it like there are words written in the callouses and cracks, and Derek fights the urge to just close his eyes and go to sleep like this. When the credit music switches from something bubbly to some grandiose, over the top score, Stiles pivots his head to look up at Derek. There’s a wicked smile on his face.

“Dude, we cuddled for, like, two hours. Are you going to make move or not?”

Derek huffs at him, feeling called out. “I didn’t know you wanted me to.”

 “Yeah, I want you to.” Stiles’ voice is low, cracking on the _yeah._ His eyes drop to Derek’s lips.  

The credits on the TV fade away, and then it’s dark and quiet enough to hear each other’s breath. Derek bends his head down and presses his mouth, hot and open against Stiles, missing the mark slightly and landing in the corner of his lips where he can feel Stiles’ smile. Stiles pulls away and sits up, turns toward Derek with real intention. He puts his knee on the other side of Derek’s thighs and kneels so that he’s taller than Derek, hovering over him, playing with the idea of nestling deep in his lap. The awkwardness of the move makes them both chuckle, nervous, but not scared. He bends down to kiss Derek properly, and it’s so good it almost hurts. Derek lets go of an involuntary gasp, almost a groan at the back of his throat, and then Stiles overwhelms him again with his lips pushing, pushing, pushing Derek’s head back into the cushion of the couch. A moment later, Stiles finally sits fully, his ass pressing into Derek’s groin as he gets comfortable in his lap.

Derek can barely keep up, completely gone in the way that he smells and tastes and feels under his fingers. He drags them down to Stiles’ hips and grabs on, letting out a burst of air like a gasp, stuttering like a teenager who’s never done this before.

“You’re forgetting to breath,” he whispers against Derek’s lips. He leans in and fits Derek’s mouth back in place, softer this time, exhaling hot hair. It feels slow and fast at the same time.

Chest to chest like this, there’s a lack of synchronicity to their breathing and their hearts. Derek has an idle urge to match him, for their lungs to pull in the same air, in step. He pulls his mouth away and rests his forehead on Stiles’, trying to slow down and catch up at the same time. Stiles fingers softly drag up and down Derek’s arms, his sides, his shoulders. He groans when Stiles’ hands graze over his chest.

“You like being touched?” he asks. Derek just softly nods. Stiles takes this seriously and leans back so he can get access to all of Derek’s torso. With more pressure, he starts with Derek’s head, digging his fingers into his hair and pressing the pads of them against Derek’s scalp. A wave of goosebumps and chills follows and Derek has to roll his shoulders against the feeling, follicles and nerves coming to life after what feels like a lifetime of neglect. He closes his eyes, because Stiles’ red cheeks and parted mouth feel like methods for hypnosis, and he doesn’t want to space out. He wants to be in this moment and feel what Stiles is doing to him

Stiles slides his hands down to cradle the back of Derek’s neck, and then he leans in quickly for a short, open mouth kiss, before settling back on Derek’s thighs again. He moves onto Derek’s shoulders and starts to knead them with more pressure than before. “Relax your muscles. You’re too tight,” Stiles tells him. Derek breathes in, and on the exhale, he lets his shoulders unwind. Stiles laughs gently. “There you go.” He spends a long time digging his fingers into Derek’s arms and shoulders, turning his biceps, leaning in for fast-breathed, liquid-hot kisses every few moments.

By the time he starts on Derek’s chest, Derek feels like a few rotations of his hips would have him coming in his jeans, right there on the couch, fully clothed. Sensing this, maybe, Stiles moves them along and pulls at the bottom of Derek’s shirt in invitation. He shivers at the feeling of warm hands touching everywhere at once as he pulls it up and over his head and throws it aside. Stiles’ nails graze softly through his chest hair, over his pecks, thumbs gently crossing over his nipples. He lets out a soft groan when hot hands start to sweep over his stomach, curling into the waist of his pants. Stiles looks him in the eyes as he maneuvers himself out of Derek’s lap and slips quickly to the floor. It hits Derek hard and sudden, what’s about to happen.

“You don’t—you—“ he struggles on the words. “You don’t have to—“

“Do you want me to stop?” Stiles asks as his hands work long strokes up and down Derek’s thighs. He feels them widen purely on impulse and thinks for half a second before shaking his head. If this could never stop, if this could go on until the supernova, that would be fine with Derek.

It feels like more than sex when Stiles hands pull Derek out of his jeans. Stiles’ fingers digging into the meat of his thighs is just like archeology, unearthing some hidden sensation in Derek that he’s covered with years of sediment. He keens, arches his back, when Stiles’ hot mouth pulls him in, and with just a few twists of his head, the fast, coil-tight waves have him pulling back. He bears down against the feeling, tries to focus on something else so he doesn’t embarrass himself with a hair-trigger orgasm, but the only thing worth looking at is the way his cock, red and severe, disappears inside of Stiles’ pale mouth. He moans, despite himself, an uncontrollable sound that he cuts off with a hard bite to his lower lip. Stiles is going to make him come so impossibly hard. It feels a little like he’s about to take his last breath.

It’s been less than 30 seconds, but Stiles’ hands keep working up and down Derek’s thighs, catching in the bunched up fabric where his jeans are pushed down, and his mouth keeps hitting the same livewire spot under the sheath of his foreskin. When Stiles thinks he can handle it, he pushes the foreskin back to lay Derek’s cockhead completely bare, and he swallows down that wet, sensitive part of him with fast sweeps of his tongue for added torture.

“I’m gonna—“ he whispers. Stiles looks up at him, lips shiny and swollen, and runs his fingers down Derek’s legs again.

“It’s okay. Come. I want you to.”

Derek almost whines. A part of him wants to melt back and cool off, steady himself and stretch this out longer because he’s not a sixteen year old getting his first blowjob. The rest of him locks onto the way Stiles sits on the floor, knees spread wide so that he can rub himself through his jeans. His lips push forward with a filthy noise, pushing Derek’s foreskin back again and then Derek’s coming, whiting out his vision, shuddering and losing all sense of time.

Maybe minutes later, or seconds, he opens his eyes. Stiles has his head resting on Derek’s inner thigh, gently stroking his other leg and looking almost in admiration as Derek’s messy cock grows softer against his thigh.

Derek doesn’t know what to do next other than tell Stiles, “Come here.”

He crawls back up to the couch, sitting beside Derek again while Derek quickly tucks himself away with shaky, come drunk hands. He presses himself into Stiles’ space, bringing his knee up to lean over him and kiss him. He pushes Stiles’ mouth open wider with his own, pressing his tongue in deep. He tastes salty and familiar like Derek’s own body, and it makes his heart beat hard against his chest. Still kissing him hard, relentlessly, he makes quick work of getting Stiles’ cock in his hand. He gasps into Derek’s mouth as Derek starts fast. Stiles is hard and wet with pre-come already, and the slide of his hand turns into an easy quick rhythm. Derek refuses to stop kissing him while he does this. He wants to make it good for him, make it unforgettable. He wants to do this again and again, until Stiles can’t speak, until he can’t take anymore.

Pumping faster, he feels Stiles’ whole body lock up underneath him and his lips stutter on the next kiss. A moment later, Stiles rips his mouth away from Derek’s to groan loud and deep. “Oh fuuuuuck,” he gets out, and then Derek is working hot come out of him, making a mess and keeping his grip tight and unrelenting. Stiles’ hands find Derek’s arm and he digs his nails in, throws his head back as his hips jerk, still coming while Derek kisses deep into his neck, tongue against the salty skin there. Stiles finally has to pull away with a shiver, oversensitive and spent.

They sit together, gripped tight and panting for what feels like a long time before Stiles finally opens his eyes again.

“Goddamnit, we’re good,” he says softly. He closes his eyes again, ignoring the needed clean up, the disheveled clothes, and exposed skin, and he leans his head back against the sofa. Derek fascinates himself with the feeling of Stiles’ dick softening in his hand still, and just the sight of this man, his chest rising and falling rapidly, and then as the seconds move on, how his breathing evens out like he’s near sleep.

Derek agrees with him. They’re good.

It’s salient and true, and it sits heavy in the room, but not uncomfortably like a burden. It’s the opposite of that. Derek is loose like turned dirt, pliable and rich, and Stiles has his gardener hands dug deep into his chest. He lets it wash over him until Stiles opens his eyes and cocks his head toward him, unaware that he’s cutting that exquisite tension in half again when he proclaims

“We should watch Maid in Manhattan.”


	2. it's not that we're scared it's just that it's delicate

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ahhh some hale back story ahead in this chapter. also the argents are bounty hunters in this story, which, if you don't know anything about it, means they are allowed to use force in order to detain and turn in people who have skipped out on their court dates etc etc google it or watch dog the bounty hunter if you wanna know more 
> 
> also i'm realizing that like most of this story takes place in a bed, which is the way it should be imo
> 
> thanks for the kind words and interest! the chapter title comes from a damien rice song called delicate. give it a listen bc it informs most of the scenes tbh (i think i'm treating the chapter titles like the OST for this story lol)
> 
> CW: theres some mention and discussion of sexual abuse in this chapter and instances of PTSD rearing its head

“You have a boyfriend,” Erica proclaims. “Isaac, come here. He has a boyfriend.”

“Will you take it down a notch?” Derek says, slamming is locker shut, not because he’s particularly angry, just because their work lockers are forty five years old and require a bit of muscle to open and close. Erica is standing in her underwear, accosting him out of the blue because she watched him open a Snapchat from Stiles, which had been a selfie he took using the dog filter, and he made the mistake of not guarding his shoulder.

He has to change for his shift, but he doesn’t think he can take his clothes off when she’s this close inside his personal bubble.

“ _Derek Hale_ does not Snapchat. Derek Hale looks down on those who Snapchat. You haven’t opened that app since I put it on your phone a year ago. The only reason you would be opening a Snapchat is if someone you _like_ was sending them to you. Ergo—you have a fucking boyfriend!” she yells, grabbing onto his arms and practically shaking him.

“Erica, Jesus. He’s not—“ Derek huffs, shrugging her off. There’s always a distinct lack of words available to him when it comes to Stiles. “I don’t know, okay? We’re just—“

“You’re dating him. It’s the sexy cop. It’s Stiles the sexy cop.” She says all this like she’s his number one fan.

“Erica, can you please use your inside voice, at least until Boyd gets here with the coffee?” Isaac moans from across the room. She ignores him.

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me,” she says suddenly, crossing her arms. There’s a hint of hurt in there somewhere, but Derek doesn’t know what to say.

It’s the night shift. 11:30 PM, and Derek would rather be anywhere other than here, tired, having this conversation with Erica in the locker room. His mind is still at home, where he left Stiles to sleep. They’re on opposite shifts this week. Switching to nights is hell no matter what, but with Stiles in the picture, it’s a new kind of torture. Derek had only just woken up when Stiles knocked on his door, after his own shift, which meant they had only an hour to spend rolling around in Derek’s bed before an alarm reminded him he had to come here for the whole night. They will have a small window in the morning, before Derek will have to crash and Stiles will have to get ready for work, and hopefully if Stiles wants to, they’ll do it all over again the next night. It’s been four days of this balancing act, of fatigue and orgasms, and short naps pressed into each other’s shoulders all blurring together in the confines of Derek’s bed. Day and night are just concepts at this point. Derek’s clock runs on Stiles, or the absence of him.

Isaac, who has been sleepily pulling his pants on for the last minute and a half while slumped on the bench in the middle of the room, finally stands up and manages to get them over his ass. “You guys fuck yet?”

Derek just gives him a look like _et tu, Isaac?_

Erica, predictably, lights up as the questions fill her mind. “You don’t even have to say it, Derek, just blink if I’m right. Below the waist? Clothes off? Light petting? Heavy petting? Hand jobs? Lube—Derek, come back.”

He escapes them to go change in the bathroom alone. She can be too much at once, sometimes. An emotional and sensory overload that demands to be heard and felt, and Derek has the urge to cage this up and protect it, and he doesn't know why. 

Inside the safety of the white walls and away from Erica’s wandering eyes, he opens a second Snapchat. It’s Stiles again, but this time there’s no dog filter on his face, and he’s holding the phone higher, so you can tell that he’s not wearing a shirt. You can tell, as the short video pans down his body, that he’s not wearing anything. He’s in a bed and you can tell that it’s Derek’s bed, that it’s Derek’s sheets that he pulls down just enough to show the top of his groin, and the hair leading south. The text over top of the video reads simply,

_miss you_ :)

Derek huffs, half amused, half turned on. In a moment of impulse, as he’s changing, he snaps a quick picture of himself in the mirror with just his briefs on, adding the words,

_Keep the bed warm,_ and he sends it before he chickens out.

As he’s buttoning up his shirt and shouldering his jacket on, there comes a tap on the door. Derek opens it to see Erica, fully dressed now, and looking a little sheepish as she avoids eye contact and slips inside, and shuts the door behind her quickly. There’s an intense frown taking the life out of her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she says, still not looking him directly.  

“What? For being you?” Derek says, and he immediately regrets it. It’s just that part of him is pissed off at her. Part of him wants to tell her all the ways that Stiles has made him laugh the past two weeks, and show her all his clever texts, and tell her about how Stiles’ blowjobs have made him cry. Part of him wants to lock those moments up in his mind where he can have them all to himself, where they can still be real. Part of him thinks that it won’t be real if he says it out loud. Part of him is angry that she was the first one to say it out loud.

“I know you’re…not as open as the rest of us. About this stuff. Look I’m—“ she sighs, almost like a growl. “I tell you about…everyone. Every guy who so much as looks at my ass, Derek. I told you about _Greenberg._ ”

“I wish you hadn’t told me about that, actually. I still can’t use the showers in here without thinking about you and him—“

She swats his arm. “It was the Christmas party, okay, every square inch of this place was covered in _s_ omebody’s bodily fluids by the end of the night. And don’t try to change the subject. I’m apologizing.”

“You’re the one who brought up Greenberg.”

“Well, I don’t want to talk about Greenberg!” she yells. She dials her voice down after a moment, uncrossing her arms, and more quietly, she tells him “I said I know you’re a private person, but this is just…kind of big, you know? It’s big for you. And I don’t think you trust us enough to tell us.”

Derek sighs through his nose and looks at her for a long moment. Then he reaches out and pulls her in to his chest, fitting his chin on head. They’ve always been like this. Explosions and tension until someone gives and they end up hugging it out. It’s a rare moment, but comfortable. She sways with him very softly, squeezing his middle hard.

“I trust you, Erica. The fact that you… that you know it’s big for me? Means I trust you.”

She pushes out a loving sigh, hot hair that warms his chest in more ways than one. “I’m sorry I’m a pusher. I’m sorry for asking you about lube.”

He chuckles softly into her coconut scented hair. “If you have to know,” he starts, pulling back. “He’s in my bed right now waiting for me to clock out. And the lube is watermelon flavored, alright?”

She claps her hands together and smiles. “So he’s, like, really real? You’ve taken a lover?”

He rolls his eyes at the word choice. “It’s just…new. Okay? Don’t jinx it.”

She drops her smile and immediately slaps a hand over her mouth. “I’m shutting up,” she says, muffled through her fingers.

***

That morning, when the sun is creeping up, and it feels like the dead of night to Derek, he slips into his house quietly. He goes to feed the dogs and change their water, but discovers that their bowls have already been filled. He looks at the kitchen sink, where Stiles has left a bowl and spoon sitting, still full of undrunk milk from some cereal he had last night. Then he moves through the blue quiet of his house, making creaks, and finally he’s in the bedroom, and Stiles is a formation of blankets and pillows there.

He strips down to boxers, kicking the clothes away. If Stiles weren’t here, Derek would have peeled his clothes off carefully. He would have put them in the hamper he keeps in the corner. The hamper has become overflown, and clothes are scattered on his bedroom floor. Some of the shirts aren’t his. If Stiles weren’t here, Derek would pick everything up and do laundry, and maybe vacuum with his brain checked out and movements automatic. This morning, he feels connected to his body, aware of every sound he makes when he crawls into bed. The bed is warm when he slips inside. If he were alone, Derek would pass out cold, on top of the sheets, staring at grey walls.

Stiles blinks his eyes open and closed for a few moments, like his body is waking up before his brain will. While Derek is setting the alarm on his phone, Stiles shifts and groans, stretching cat-like as he wrangles his limbs from under the blankets.

“My foot’s asleep,” he says with thick, early morning gravel in his throat.

“Because you sleep with your legs crossed. That’s bad for your circulatory system.”

“Ugh,” Stiles says as kicks his foot from side to side, colliding gently with Derek’s shin every now and then. “It’s too early to be talking about the circulatory system.”

“Early for you. Late for me.” Derek pulls the covers up a bit and nestles in while Stiles tangles his cold feet in the forgotten sheets at the end of the bed.

“I want to call in sick. Just sleep all damn day,” Stiles says, wiggling his head over onto Derek’s side of the pillow. He nestles into the crook of Derek’s neck and Derek brings his hand up to sweep over Stiles’ back. He grumbles in agreement, but it’s not possible right now. The weekend waits.

“You have crime to fight,” Derek reminds him.

Stiles heaves a huge sigh. “You should save that line for when I finally become batman.”

Derek laughs while Stiles suddenly turns over to fish around for something on the bedside table. He knocks over his watch and softy curses, “Shit,” and then, with great effort, he comes back to the center of the bed with a small box of Listerine breath strips, of all things.

“I came prepared,” he says with as much pride and enthusiasm that he can muster at 6 AM.

“You know I don’t care about your morning breath.”

“Derek, every morning for the past week, we have made out with the combined nastiness of a four cups of bad work coffee and 8 hours of dead sleep between us. We need to raise our standards. I refuse to be one of those couples that, like, pops each other’s zits and uses the same toothbrush without a care in the world.” 

“Well, now I’m really in the mood,” Derek says. And after a moment, while Stiles’ sleepy fingers attempt to pull out two breath strips for the both of them, his brain seems to register what Stiles just said. He accepts a breath strip, which Stiles places directly on his tongue. He doesn’t want to misinterpret this simply because Erica was fucking with him earlier. Still, he has to ask, “So are we…?” He trails off, chickens out.

“Are we what? Minty fresh? I think I might need two of these.” He shoves another one in his mouth and the air begins to smell like sharp peppermint.

“No, I—“ Derek thinks of ways to backpedal, but Stiles is too perceptive to just let Derek change the subject. He shuffles closer in the bed, sensing that Derek is being serious.

“Are we what?” he asks Derek again, softer this time.

“You said…you didn’t want to be like one of those couples….”

“Oh,” Stiles says, getting it finally. “You mean _are we a couple_?”

Derek feels like running, but Stiles’ index finger is softly resting on his arm. It may as well be a thousand pounds of pressure holding him down. “Are we?”

“I don’t know.” Stiles brows furrow, and he looks like he’s a little lost for words, for the first time maybe.

Derek’s stomach spasms with anxiety and he has to look away from Stiles’ eyes, hard and searching. It’s an odd look on Stiles. An unsure one. He’s always so sure about everything, and Derek’s heart sinks as he realizes that Stiles isn’t sure right now. He’s not sure about Derek.

“I’m sorry. You don’t have to… we don’t have to…” God, he wishes he had the words. “Forget it.” And he starts to get up, maybe to go shower, maybe to take the dogs for a run. He would run until he hit the town line, probably. He would find a way to wash himself down the shower drain.

“No, no, no, no, no,” Stiles says, tugging on his arm, pulling him back into place. “Derek, come on.”

“No, just—“ he lets Stiles maneuver him back in place, but his mind fights against it.

“Don’t just shut down, okay?” He stops and looks away, up at the ceiling. “It’s a fair question. And the answer is I don’t know what we are yet.”

“Okay.” Derek wants badly to not sound broken. He badly wants to not feel broken. He badly wishes he were the kind of person who could take hits, who could weather disappointment, who could measure a relationship normally without feeling like his whole life is riding on it. It’s not normal to feel this way.

“But now you think that I don’t like you.” Stiles grips his arm a little tighter. “And that’s not true, okay? I’m just… I’ve said the wrong thing before, and jump started things too soon, and it all got fucked up. I don’t want that to happen again, so I just--” He makes a frustrated sound in the back of his throat.

Derek just decides not to say anything, even though Stiles has asked him to not shut down.

“Hey,” he says, louder than before. Derek forces himself to look him in the eyes again, and when he does, Stiles is moving. He pushes Derek’s shoulder back gently and sits up on his side so he can lean over Derek. He hovers there, smelling like cool mint and morning. Derek kisses him like a reflex, like he can’t help it. Stiles sinks down so that his body is right up against Derek’s side and he kisses him deeper, harder, breaking for huge gulps of air, hitching his leg over Derek’s body. In only three weeks they’ve mastered this. Kissing him is a never-ending paradox of give and take.

Stiles pulls back and examines Derek’s eyes, flitting back and forth. The sun has started to come up, casting weird shadows through the curtains and filling the room with a half-there kind of light. It’s enough to brighten up the brown in Stiles’ eyes. He closes them, breathes in, and catches Derek’s mouth off guard again. His hand moves between their bodies until it’s slipping inside of Derek’s boxers and rubbing him gently.

Derek gasps away for a moment, hiding his face in the pillow while Stiles just gets closer and closer to him, and starts to bring him off. He feels Stiles press his forehead against Derek’s shoulder.

“I like you so much,” he tells him. And then quieter, “I don’t know…we’re something.”

***

When another week passes, Derek finds himself waiting for the other shoe to drop. He waits for disaster, for something uncontrollable to happen. He almost expects it. Stiles could have an ex that he’s not over, someone he still loves, and it might be that he’s biding time with Derek. Or maybe he’s secretly cruel—he’s a practitioner of heart break and Derek is a new pet project that he successfully has eating out of the palm of his hand. If a universe existed where that any of that were true, Derek might still keep kissing him, and sleeping with him, and falling for every word. It might be better to experience it than to not, and it scares him to think this way.

They spend a lot of nights together like the first night, curled on the sofa watching movies on Netflix. They spend a lot of time quietly talking, or mostly not using words, just the particular squeeze on the shoulder that means something different from the particular drag of nails on the forearm.

Some Saturday night, when he Stiles texts him to come over, he’s nervous answering the door and letting Derek in. Derek can sense it in the way he keeps chewing on his lower lip throughout the entirety of _Inception._ He told Derek two days ago that this is his sixth favorite movie and he’s seen it so many times that he can hum the entire Hans Zimmer score, so there’s no real reason for him to be in suspense when Leo DiCaprio starts screaming for Tom Hardy not to shoot.

“Is something wrong?” he asks. _Do you want me to leave?_

Stiles bites on that lower lip again, and then he pauses the movie, turning to Derek. “Nothing’s wrong, I just—“

Derek feels it—all the air in the room dissipates in an instant and his skin feels tight against his bones. He’s going to sever Derek in half with words like _I don’t think we should do this anymore_ or _I’m just not in a good place right now._ Only the next thing out of Stiles’ mouth is,

“I was thinking you could fuck me.”

Derek allows himself to sink back into the couch, partly in relief, and partly because he’s hit with the sudden image of spreading Stiles apart, sinking in deep and slowly. It’s something he hasn’t allowed himself to consider because Stiles prefers to fuck. He likes to hold Derek’s hips down and straight, and he likes to be the one in control of the pressure and the rhythm, and Derek likes it that way, too. He likes how it feels like he’s more naked than Stiles, even when they both have their clothes off, and he likes when Stiles makes him come from the inside out, like no one has ever been able to do. Nervously, Stiles continues on in a ramble. “I mean, we could try, maybe. If you want to. We don’t have to. I kind of…got ready, you know, in case you did want to. Fuck me, that is.”

“Are you sure you—“

“I don’t know if I’m going to like it…so I reserve the right to rescind the offer, but I think I want to see what it’s like. With you.”

It’s not even a question. “Okay,” he tells him, reaching to touch the side of his neck.

It feels a little stiff when they go to bed that night. Derek breathes hard, wet kisses into Stiles' thighs as he peels down the underwear. Stiles doesn't move for a second or two, just lays flat, half hard and quiet. Derek asks him again and again if he can touch, if it's okay to bend his knees, to spread his cheeks, to press the pads of his fingers into the tight spot that loosens quickly. After what feels like a long time, Stiles is the one to press Derek's cock in on a sigh, like he's tired of being treated so delicately. It's beautiful and agonizing, and Derek wants to fucking weep at how Stiles' ass clenches down around him. He stutters in and out of him, feeling wound up and ready to burst after a few minutes. He tries his best to do it properly, to hit the spot that he knows feels best for him. Stiles only breathes hard as Derek gasps and whimpers. It's so tight and he's so close, but Stiles hasn't said a word. He usually whispers filthy things in Derek's ear when he fucks him.

"Come for me," is all Stiles says. "Go on, come in me."

He whines, trying to hold on, fumbling for Stiles' dick to bring him closer. Stiles swats away his hand and pushes his ass up to meet Derek halfway. He rotates his hips a little and pulls back sharply. As Derek comes hard, biting Stiles’ shoulder, Stiles pats his back in placating kind of way. Pulling out gently, Stiles winces and lets himself adjust. He’s still only half hard, and he looks a little disappointed.

Panting, Derek kneels over him. "You didn't come." 

Stiles gives his cock a lazy stroke, but it's dry and stays half hard, growing softer by the minute. "It's okay." 

“You should have told me to stop,” Derek says, feeling like he’s taken more than he’s given as he throws the condom in the trash. Stiles shrugs, pulls him back in for a kiss.

“Well, you seemed to be enjoying yourself.”

Those words tug at a string in his brain, a string that holds him together. “What does that matter? You didn't like it." Derek looks away, face suddenly hot. He's yelling. 

“Not really, no,” Stiles says, raising his voice to match him a little. “But what’s the big deal? I wanted you to come.”

“If you don’t like something, then don’t just go along with it to make the other person happy.” He says this with sharpness, biting, and then he sits up to find his boxers and drag them on. If he closes his eyes, he thinks of Kate’s hands on him in the back seat of her car. He shakes his head to be rid of the memory, but it only sort of works. He can sense that this is an overreaction, but he feels sick down to his bones about this. He just took Stiles' body and did whatever he wanted to it, nearly weeping in joy from how good it felt, and it was fake. It was all for him. He breathes sharply, but the breath catches in his chest and he quickly pulls in another, skirting on the edge of a hyperventilation. He clenches his fists hard at his sides. 

“Whoa, whoa, hey,” Stiles says, sitting up now. “Slow the fuck down. Can you tell me what’s going on here?” Derek stands up and starts to get dressed. He only stops when Stiles’ voice changes, saying, “Derek, stay and fucking talk to me. Baby.”

Derek huffs. He wants to go for a walk. He wants to get back in bed and forget about this. He doesn’t know what to do.

“What is it?” Stiles says. His voice is calm, but suspended in disbelief, like he doesn’t know where to begin.

Derek sits on the edge of the bed, pants on, twisting his t-shirt in his hands. How many times can he fuck this up? How many times will he put this on the edge of a cliff?

“I don’t like it when…” he starts. “When I benefit from someone else’s suffering.”

"Derek, I was a little bored. You didn't hurt me. I wasn’t _suffering_."

“I’m sorry.”

"Can I ask..." Stiles starts, voice going soft. Careful. "Were you hurt like that by someone you were...someone you were sleeping with?" 

He doesn't say anything. Doesn't move a muscle. At this, Stiles crawls his way over to Derek's side and sits next to him on the edge of the bed. He gets his answer from silence, and then he tells him,

"Okay. It's okay. I'm sorry, okay? I'm sorry. Just breathe." 

Derek sits with his head in his hands. He breathes and breathes and breathes until it feels small again, until everything goes back into its right place, and he can cope. Pulling his head up, he's red eyed and Stiles is a little teary too. They kiss and go to sleep, and promise to not to pretend in front of each other. 

***

He cooks dinner for Stiles because Stiles can’t cook, he soon discovers. He watches the process of sweet potato gnocchi with rapt fascination, leaning in close on the counter when Derek starts mincing onion. “How do you get to be so tiny, though?” he asks, blinking back tears from the acidity in the air.

“I’d show you, but you’ll cut yourself.”

“Oh, come on, like that’s avoidable. I cut myself using child proof scissors,” he says, rolling his eyes. “And I’m dating a paramedic, so it should be a non-issue.”

Phrases like that, words that hint at something, that promise validation and security, they cause Derek’s brain to freeze up in hopeful panic. His hand slips when he starts on the garlic, and he’s the one who ends up cutting himself on the knife. Stiles won’t let him live it down.

As he’s pulling the sweet potatoes out of the oven, Stiles gets a call that he takes in the other room. Derek hears him laughing and then pausing to say “um,” a few times. When he comes back, he’s scratching his head a little.

“So,” he starts. “That was Lydia and she’s in town for one night only.”

“Oh,” Derek says, turning the boiling water down to low. “You guys will want to get together.”

“No, like,” Stiles says, coming forward. He takes a fork and starts to poke one of the sweet potatoes, probably because it’s something he saw Derek do earlier. “Like, I was thinking we could all hang out tonight. Scott too, he’s with her. I mean, if you’re cool with that. You don’t have to meet them.”

“I’ve met Scott.”

“Yeah, but not without terrible accident reports to give you guys something to talk about.”

“Scott’s nice. It will be fine.” He likes Scott immensely because he’s warm and friendly, and the few times they’ve met on the scene of some disaster, Scott has been so in control, fixing the problems that come up with quick effortless thinking, and turning around to break the tension with a stupid joke. 

They end up at the firehouse bar a few hours later because it’s comfortable and familiar. He invites Boyd, who invites Isaac, who invites Erica, and so what was meant to be just a casual night out turns into a large, push-the-tables-together group outing. Derek feels nervous having everyone he cares about at one table with everyone Stiles cares about, and it dawns on him that this is like an official friend introduction, an amalgamation of their social lives.

Lydia Martin is a woman that he should have on his side. He senses this immediately. She has what looks like two ounces of neat scotch in a tumbler in front of her, while the rest of the group is messily fighting over the last pint in the pitcher. Stiles says she’s a mathematician who teaches at Berkley, and she looks like she could reduce his entire life down to numbers and work him swiftly out of the equation.

While Scott and Isaac start animatedly talking about some show they both watch, Lydia turns to him.

“I guess this is the part where I tell you not to fuck with him,” she says. “But I can tell it’s probably not necessary with you.”

“It’s not,” he says, smiling. Stiles, who is talking with Kira and Boyd, looks up and winks at him when Kira launches into her story.

“You know,” she goes on. “I usually have to set up some elaborate fake run-in with him and the people he’s dating if I ever want to meet them.”

“Is this an elaborate set up right now?” Derek asks, looking around at the casual banter. He can’t imagine how she might have planned to have a drunken Erica egging Scott on to arm wrestle.

She shakes her head. “This was his idea. I was pleasantly surprised.”

He doesn’t really know what to say except, “We all kind of work together. So I guess it’s not that…intimidating. I don’t know.”

“Ah,” she starts, picking up her scotch and swirling it twice before taking a sip. “That’s the thing, though. I don’t work with you, and when it comes to introducing me the assholes he usually dates, he’s the definition of intimidated.”

Derek laughs, drinks his beer, and tries hard to not openly stare at Stiles form across the table. “He seems fine.”

Lydia clinks her glass with his and says, “Well, I guess that means you're not an asshole.”

 

***

 

One night, there is a fire.

There’s a fire lots of nights, ones that live in Derek’s sleep, and have him sweating through the sheets, waking hot and dry to an empty, cold room. This time, the fire is real and Derek is awake.

They get the call around 3 in the morning, right as they’re leaving the hospital after having admitted some poor college kid with alcohol poisoning and a bump on the head from the lengthy fall down the frat house steps. Isaac is with him tonight, and he responds into the radio when dispatch tells them all available units should respond.

Derek hears it, dreads it, and starts driving all the same because it’s his job, even though he knows tonight is going to be bad. Tonight is going to be the worst there is. A house fire. A family of four. There’s nothing but work and challenge ahead, and bad memories, and assault against senses. He grips the steering wheel tightly, white knuckled and angry, as he flies the ambulance past the parked cars on the residential street. Lights on, no sirens.

“You gonna be okay?” Isaac asks.

“Get the O2 ready,” is all Derek says as he spots the dense crowd of red and blue lights up ahead, and beyond that, the grey plumes of heavy smoke, the embers of someone’s whole life flashing briefly in the sky before burning out to ash.

They park with the other units from a different company, near the EMT van, and Isaac has listened to Derek by getting the tubes connected to all the tanks, water, gauze, and vomit bags at the ready.

The sound is a deafening thing, makes him want to run, run, run, but he pushes it down, compacts it and starts to throw himself in with the firefighters, getting as much information as he can. Down the street, two EMTs are administering oxygen to a mother and her small son, dressed in pyjamas. He can’t hear her crying over the sound of the fire and the hoses, and the growing amount of high tension chatter among firefighters, cops, and paramedics, but he can see her panicked shoulders heaving as the EMT’s talk her down. The boy beside the mother isn’t crying, but he looks confused, like he’d been dreaming peacefully of ponies or trains or whatever it is little boys dream about, and now he’s here on the road, stinking like smoke.

Derek can’t decide if it’s worse to look at the house. The fire is big and all-encompassing in the way that the restaurant fire last month was not. The Lieutenant on duty tells him that the dad and the teen daughter are still inside the house, and they’re waiting on a response from the team that went in about two minutes ago.

Derek can do nothing else but stand and watch the flames grow and shrink, and wait for either something or nothing to emerge from the broken upper window, where they should be bringing the girl out, who he will put in his rig and rush to the hospital, partly just to get far, far away himself, and partly so he take the girl far, far away from this place.

“Derek,” someone is saying behind him.

Derek almost doesn’t look. It’s taking what feels like all of his energy to keep his eyes peeled, and if he looks away, he won’t be able to look back, so he stands there with a set jaw and ignores the sounds around him. He just needs to get to the girl and take care of her, and it will be fine.

“Derek, take the woman and the kid the hospital.”

He doesn’t want to listen, but it’s Stiles speaking to him. It’s Stiles and Isaac. The light from the firetruck behind him bounces off the top of Stiles’ head, red and bright, making the messy hair appear like it’s lit lowly with flames. Derek shouldn’t think about that, not about Stiles and fire. They are two natural forces that shouldn’t mix, that shouldn’t have anything to do with the other. And somehow Stiles is here, where he shouldn’t be. Derek lets himself register the uniform, the nametag on his chest that says his last name, a familiar insignia, a piece of metal that he’s felt pressed against his bare chest, just yesterday when he went to Stiles after work.

They’re both on nights this week, that’s right, and it’s reasonable to see him here; a cop and a house a fire. Yet still, he can’t have Stiles in this moment. It’s a cognitive dissonance. It doesn’t fit.

In the last few moments, he’s almost forgotten about the girl. The eldest daughter, the fireman said. A teenager in the attic room, a room she probably begged to have if just for that extra flight of stairs in between her and her family, searching for that modicum of privacy that teenagers demand. Laura had been on the top floor of Derek’s house, too, because she wanted to paint and listen to loud music, and sneak out onto the roof to smoke cigarettes. Laura had been the last one they got out, in the end, when it was—

“Derek, did you hear me?” he says, reaching out. Derek’s reality snaps back as he feels Stiles’ hand land somewhere around his neck.

Up ahead, two more ambulances appear. Lights on, no sirens. Has it gotten quiet?

“Go with Isaac,” he’s saying now. “The others will handle the rest.” Derek feels the weight of the world press down right where Stiles’ hand is, but it’s better that way, for some reason. He locks eyes with Stiles when he repeats himself. “Go with Isaac.”

So Derek goes.

***

Some unknown amount of hours later, Derek emerges from the automatic doors of the hospital, done with his shift, and feeling like a piece of porcelain that’s been broken and glued together a hundred times over. The sun is still just a suggestion at the edge of the world, and the hospital parking lot is still lit well with bright stadium lights up ahead.

It takes a few steps for him to realize that the cop car parked sideways in the visitor parking has Stiles behind the wheel. He jerks out of his seat to lean across the dash and open the passenger door. Derek stares at him almost in disbelief, which comes off as cold, most likely, but really it’s just that he can barely make sure that air is getting to his lungs semi-regularly.

“My place?” Stiles calls.

Derek gets in, fumbling with numb hands as he settles in the car. Seatbelt. Seatbelt to buckle. Press it in. Don’t look at Stiles’ face. He could start crying, and wouldn’t that be the perfect ending to it all.

Stiles starts driving, despite the meltdown going on in Derek’s brain. It’s a combination of memory, new ones like the particular way that the color green melted off the side panels of that house. Old memories are there too, more worn and battered like old photographs he can’t be bothered to get rid of. Burn holes in his family home like cigarette scorches on paper. There’s an image of Peter’s mouth open and leaking smoke, black and unreal, sinking to the floor like fog and surround Derek’s feet. Some of these things are the stuff of nightmare. Some of them are Derek’s junior year of high school.

“The dad from the house…” Stiles starts, clicking his turn signal and waiting patiently for the light to turn. “He’s didn’t make it out on time. But the girl’s fine. Some burn marks on her hands and smoke inhalation, but she’s okay.” He waits for some kind of response from Derek, but nothing comes. They get closer and closer to what looks like Stiles’ street and Stiles tells him, “We don’t have to talk about it.”

Stiles’ rental home is a two story duplex of which he occupies the bottom. The top belongs to his landlord, a nice old lady who always says cheeky things to the two of them when she catches them in the hall. He can’t wait to be inside, where Stiles’ mismatched Ikea furniture waits for them, where his under-the-sea shower curtain can be pulled aside to reveal six hundred empty and half-empty bottles of shampoo along the entire side of the tub. He wants Stiles to heat up the perpetual leftover pizza in the fridge while Derek opts for instant oatmeal, and he wants to sit side by side at the kitchen island eating while Stiles checks all the notifications on his phone, turning it around every so often to show Derek something funny he was tagged in. He wants to quietly roll into Stiles’ bed and lazily slick up their hands, roll into each other and come loosely twice, maybe three times before the sun is fully up and they pass out.

Stiles leads him inside, but they go straight for the shower, pausing naked to shove the smoke ruined clothes into the washing machine.

It’s too small a space for the both of them, so Stiles lets Derek go first while he fills the sink up with warm water to shave. Derek scrubs the night off his skin with something smelling vaguely of lavender and he watches Stiles through a crack in the curtain as he nicks himself and curses.

“Careful,” he says on impulse. His voice feels rough and like it hasn’t been used in hours, and maybe it hasn’t. It’s a blur now, which he’s thankful for, because he’ll be able to sleep that way, just letting the last 10 hours fade into the background.

Stiles flicks his eyes up to the mirror where Derek’s face is partially reflected, and he smirks at him, knowing and curious at the same time.

When they’re both clean, and the washer is on with twice the amount of fresh scent beads and detergent added to the mix, they skip food altogether and go straight to bed with their damp hair resting on the pillows. Stiles sets the alarm for some arbitrary afternoon hour. They don’t have to wake up on a schedule today. It’s their day off tomorrow, the day they’re supposed to spend relaxing and readjusting their sleep schedule. Derek closes his eyes, but he’s wide awake, and finally, _finally,_ he manages to find the words.

“You know about my family, don’t you?” he asks.

Stiles, who has been looking at his phone on the other side of the bed, puts it down next to his head and rolls over. His silence speaks a lot of words, but he answers him after a while. “I found this box in the back at the station…a fucking laundry list of complaints about bounty hunters in the area and all these scattered documents form the bail bonds office. It was just piling up and none of the guys would tell me anything about it. And then I found all these thrown out assault charges with the local judge. And it was driving me crazy, like...why hasn't a single one of these Argents been charged with anything, when there was probable cause at every turn? They seemed just…fucking dangerous. Then I found your case.”

“It’s the only time the Argent hunters have been charged,” Derek says steadily. “Arson and voluntary manslaughter. Six accounts. Two attempted.”

“Kate Argent,” Stiles says quietly. He hates the sound of her name in his mouth.

“Yeah,” Derek replies. He rolls over and breathes a few steady breaths. It’s not as though he hasn’t said these things out loud before. He’s said them more times than he can count. It was the great climax of his entire life, the sharp incline that brought the end. These past 10 years have haven nothing but a steady decline, a drawn out and sad conclusion. Looking at Stiles and the way he nervously runs his fingers through his hair, he wonders how true that still is.

“After Peter was indicted… “ Derek closes his eyes, remembers uncle Peter’s office—the tallest building in Beacon Hills. His grassroots investment company, honest, local, and small time. He remembers not understanding what any of it meant when Peter would come over drunk in the daytime, sleeping on Talia's couch as Cora and Derek watched TV for any signs of their uncle on the news. He was all over the news back then, and it had been kind of exciting, even not knowing exactly what embezzlement and fraud really meant. He remembers someone else’s name being put on the tallest building in Beacon Hills—a worker scraping the HALE decal away one letter at a time. “He had nothing, you know? So he had to go through the bondsman to post the bail. There was no more money. My mom just—“ He feels his chest ache with the memory of her, white hot for a second. “Even when he skipped the hearing, she let him hide out. But the Argents...Peter had the biggest bounty on his head in the tri-county area…none of us knew.”

Somewhere in the county records office, there’s a folder with Derek’s testimony carefully transcribed. In a scratchy new suit, the same one he’d worn to the funeral, he’d stared at the ground as the District Attorneys asked him to tell them everything he knew. He knew that the Argents stalked them for a week, all of them at first, Gerard and his two children, and then it had just been Kate knocking every day. Following them outside of school. She gave Derek a ride home from school the day before she set the fire, pulling up in a large, black SUV that reminded him of the Secret Service. He didn’t know that she was a bounty hunter. She never told him why she wanted to find Peter, just that she needed to. He wonders if Stiles got his hands on that testimony, how far into the records he read. There are parts he left out, like how she had been touching his dick through his jeans when she asked him all her questions. _I know he’s hiding with your family, Derek. Go on, tell me how to get to him. Go on._

“It should have been a murder charge,” Stiles whispers, angry, teeth grit.

Derek just sighs and looks up at the ceiling where there’s a crack that’s slowly been creeping to the center where the light hangs. Stiles’ place, despite the charm of it, is slowly falling apart. “She wasn’t trying to kill us. She wanted to smoke Peter out.” 

Stiles makes a pained noise, dragging his hand over his face. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

“It’s over, anyway.” It’s a piece of the past, an old ugly thing he’s come to terms with. It lives with him every day, mostly in the background, and sometimes it makes its appearances on death anniversaries, on birthdays, and always in front of a fire.

Stiles, who has been lying with his eyes closed for a while, drags his hand over Derek’s arm and he says, “I love you.”

Derek arches his head back into the pillow, wanting to laugh. Disbelief. “Don’t just say that because you feel sorry for me right now.”

“I do feel sorry for you. How could I not? But I also love you. They’re not mutually exclusive.”

The dam in him breaks, water flows, tears too, probably, and Derek rolls into him entirely. He lets Stiles wrap his arm around his back, tucking his knees up, working his way into whatever crevices he can find. His dry lips kiss some unknown part of Stiles’ skin and he tells him he loves him back on a whisper. It feels like a scream.

“I know I said I didn’t want to fuck this up, or do this wrong.” Stiles just holds him so tightly, his body showing conviction. His words are careful. “It’s too fast, probably. For other people.”

“You’re not like other people,” Derek says to him, pulling his head up. He’s never met anyone like Stiles and he never will, and he never wants to.

“Alright, fuck it.” He chuckles. “I’m madly in love with you.”


	3. covered in lines the fossils i find

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll finish this gd story if it's the last thing i do!!!!
> 
> thank you if you stuck with me and my terrible writers block 
> 
> chapter title and song comes from "john my beloved" by sufjan stevens

There was no mistake made when Stiles compared Lydia to Erica. Derek soon learns that they have different, but equally effective varieties of getting what they want. With Erica, it’s simply a matter of brute force and a lack of boundaries. She’s an emotional battering ram that works her way in without a whole lot of finesse. Lydia, like a lock pick, sneaks her way in and takes control without you ever having noticed. Derek really, truly experiences this for the first time on Stiles’ birthday.

She arrives that afternoon with an itinerary of errands and jobs for them all, and with Scott in tow, who looks a bit sleepy and uneasy, like the memo of the day’s events haven’t been passed onto him either. Derek tries to roll with it as she invites herself into his house, looks around with the kind of conviction that makes it appear as though she’s been here before, and knows the space intimately. Somehow at the same time, she also gives the impression that she’s judging everything, taking in every speck of dust that so much as passes through the air in front of her. Derek wishes he’d maybe swept some of the excess dog hair, or lit one of those Bath and Body Works candles that Isaac gets him every year, inexplicably, for Christmas.

“The first thing you have to know is,” she’s saying as she makes her way into the living room. Scott looks around with a little less weight, and predictably, gets on his knees to roughhouse with the dogs. “Stiles treats his birthday like middle aged women in romantic comedies treat their birthdays—he’s devastated by the number every year.”

“We never actually write his age on any of the cards,” Scott says, now on his back with his knees up while Oden pounces on him. “I’m not even sure I know how old he is this year.”

“It’s an absolute rule. His age is always _implied,_ but never directly stated or referenced at any point during the birthday party. No _Happy 27 th!_ message on the card. No big balloons shaped like a two and a seven. And especially NO numbered candles.”

“Yeah that last one…Danny lit his cake with 24 candles a few years ago and Stiles couldn’t blow them all out,” Scott says.

“God, what a disaster.” Lydia turns around and looks at Derek like she’s recounting a war story. “He threw up so much cake and Jack Daniels on my shoes that night. $980 Louies.”

“So just don’t make any old man jokes until he’s at least a mile away from a bar,” Scott says, hauling himself up now that Oden has become bored and moved on to sniffing Lydia.

“Got it,” Derek says. “But he seemed okay this morning. With the age crisis, I mean.”

“Ah,” Lydia says, narrowing her eyes. “That’s right. He’s got himself an older boyfriend. It’s putting things in perspective. You know, this might be the best birthday he’s had in years.”

“Derek’s not that old,” Scott says on his behalf, resting a hand on his shoulder and turning to him. “You’re just, like, really great at growing a beard?”

He tries not to take Lydia’s subtle dig at his age as criticism. He’s 32 and that number never used to matter, but next to Stiles at 27, he wonders if the five years make some kind of drastic difference. He wonders what it might be like if he’d met Stiles in his twenties instead, back when he hadn’t quite worked the Thanatos out of his system, and the world had been his personal punching bag. Those were angry, listless years. He wonders if Stiles would be attracted to that, or repulsed by how cavalier and self-destructive he’d been. It doesn’t feel wrong to have met him at this age, but looking at Lydia and Scott, who have known every phase of Stiles’ life, he wants to crack open their memories and really _understand._

“Okay, down to business. We have things to do and very little time to do them.” Lydia says this on a spin, clasping her hands loosely together in front of her face.

“We’re late, we’re late,” Scott chants half-heartedly under his breath. “For a very important date.”

“Now, I have an appointment at the salon—“

“See? A _very important date,_ ” Scott says, laughing a bit.

She shoots him a sharp look, just the slightest tilt of her head, and it seems like a refined kind of weapon that Scott immediately backs down to. Derek crosses his arms, amused and confused by what it is they actually need from him, and Lydia focuses her attention back to him like she thinks Derek is likely to take all of this more seriously than Scott. “I have an appointment at the salon that I can’t miss which means I’m leaving the balloons, cake, and decoration delivery up to you two.”

“Not that I don’t want to hang with Derek,” Scott says. “But why do we need two people for that?”  

“McCall, you dropped the cupcakes last year, which were very expensive specialty flavors from Stiles’ favorite bakery, if you remember. I’m assigning some damn backup.” She turns to Derek and asks him in a way that’s not really a question, “Derek, it’s your day off, right? You don’t mind going with him.”

“I’ll carry the cake.” Derek smiles at how Scott rolls his eyes. “No problem.”

The non-surprise surprise birthday party for Stiles is happening tonight at a restaurant downtown, which Stiles knows about, but pretends that he doesn’t. Given that his friends have been throwing surprise parties every year since high school, Stiles has come to expect it. The surprise part is just a novelty, but it’s fond tradition, and every year, they make it their mission to concoct more and more ridiculous excuses to get Stiles to come out to the designated venue. Once, when Kira had been nine months pregnant, and they’d told him that she was in the middle of giving spontaneous birth in the back room of the local nightclub, and as the godfather, he had to be there.

Derek ends up riding shotgun in Scott’s car, where there is a collection of toys, baby food pouch wrappers, and crushed up goldfish crackers littering the spaces in between the two car seats in the back. Scott keeps apologizing for the mess, red cheeked and sounding a bit tired, like even if he’d bothered tidying up the car, it would make no difference in the grand scheme of being the father to two kids under the age of 5. Derek tells him he doesn’t mind, even when he finds an old pacifier stuck halfway under his ass in the front seat. There’s something kind of charming about it, anyway.

They make quick work of the afternoon, picking up the decorations from Party City—a nondescript collection of banners and balloons that don’t give an aura of any particular age. The cake is from that same bakery that Stiles loves—and Derek is on a first name basis with the guy at the counter, since he and Stiles come here nearly every Sunday for the breakfast special and most mornings on the way to work for the espressos. He buys one for Scott on their way out, who drinks it all in one gulp.

“Don’t tell Kira,” he says, licking his lips and closing his eyes in appreciation. “We’re supposed to be on a green tea cleanse.”

Once they’ve dropped everything off at the restaurant, paid the deposit to the owner, and Scott has rearranged the balloon placement in the dining room about three times, they start heading back. Scott launches into a story about a call they responded to last week where an old woman couldn’t figure out how to turn her smoke detector off on a false alarm, which she thought warranted the whole fire team. They’d ended up staying for a few hours to have tea and biscuits with her. They’re both laughing about it when Scott makes a turn that is distinctly in the opposite direction of Derek’s street.

“Oh, yeah dude, sorry. I gotta pick up the kids from my mom’s house. It’ll just take a second.” And as they’re pulling up to a nice residential home with several cars already in the driveway and a few kids toys on the front lawn. “You can come say hi, if you want.”

Derek follows him a little awkwardly out of the car, figuring that it’s the social and normal thing to do. It would look weird for him to just sit in a parked car on the side of the street like he’s not even there. As they make their way up the walkway, Scott tells him, “Stiles pretty much lived here when we were kids, you know? And that was waaaay before our parents even started dating. His dad moved in, like, last week so we’re almost step-brothers. Kind of.  It’s a little fucking weird seeing them live together and stuff, but it’s like… you know...full circle.”

Derek’s brain does several things at once over the span of the next few seconds. He pulls up the very few conversations that Stiles and him have had about his dad, how he and Scott’s mom have fallen into retirement age love with each other and will probably end up having one of those fancy cruise ship weddings when she finally hangs up her stethoscope. He thinks briefly about how family is still a touchy subject between the two of them, how conversations about what Cora is doing in Argentina are so rare, and how he doesn’t even know what Stiles’ father looks like, or what his name is. Even after five months, neither of them have attempted to bring up the concept of Derek meeting him yet.  

And it clicks in his head, what Scott has just told him.

“You mean Stile’s dad lives here?  As in…he’s here right now?” Derek asks, stopping in his tracks as Scott’s hand lands on the doorknob. Scott freezes and turns around to look at Derek, a mixture of realization and horror crossing over his face. But neither of them have any time to do anything, and Derek can’t flee to go sit in the car like a loser as he should of in the first place, because the door suddenly opens.

A warm looking woman with dark salt and pepper hair and one of Scott’s babies on her hip is standing there, smile plastered on her face. “Hey, kiddo,” she greets. “Who’s your friend?”

Scott sheepishly purses his lips and then rubs his hand over his forehead like he’s suddenly got a bad headache. “Um. This is Stiles’ boyfriend, Derek,” he says slowly.

“Nice to meet you,” Derek says quickly, offering his hand and looking behind her shoulder at the bit of living room he can spot. It feels like Stiles’ father is lurking in the shadows, watching him. He really shouldn’t be here. It’s all wrong.

Melissa shakes his hand warmly and stares at him for half a second, and then she turns back to Scott. “Scott, did you bring Stiles’ boyfriend over to his father’s house…without Stiles?”

Scott nods and Derek shoves his hands deep into his pockets, wanting so badly to start running in the opposite direction. Melissa hitches the baby up higher on one hip while pointedly placing her hand on the other. “Hun, you’ve gotta give up the tea cleanse and switch back to coffee. You’re not firing on all cylinders, here.”

Scott nods again, and then Melissa is laughing her ass off, passing the baby in her arms over to Scott, who takes his daughter and buries his frown in the black hair on top of her head. “We were running errands for the party and— I just didn’t even… It’s only been two weeks since the move! You guys haven’t even finished unpacking!”

“Oh, Stiles is going to kill you,” she says, wiping a laughter tear from the corner of her eye.

Just as Derek is about to propose that he turn around and walk home, the man of the hour emerges, descending down the stairs with Scott’s oldest daughter in tow. He’s not nearly as tall as Stiles, but he has the same laughter wrinkled eyes, the same sharp cheeks. There’s a distinct air of authority radiating from him. Derek shifts his arms, uncrossing them, suddenly self-conscious, and he wonders for a hot, panicky moment just how much the man knows about him, about his relationship with his son.

It feels like a bubble bursting. It’s been months of just the two of them, their tiny enclave in each other’s beds, and the quiet, steady togetherness. It’s been months of a slow stitching. They’ve been weaving a single thread through each other’s lives and pulling tight to sew them together with small gestures, but Derek suddenly realizes that they’ve missed spots. There are gaping holes. Stiles whispers _I love you_ in his ear and they get quietly giddy about the future, but they’ve forgotten big parts. It feels wrong, suddenly, that Derek doesn’t know Stiles’ father at all, that it’s strange for him to be accompanying Scott to this house, when it should be a warm and familiar place.

The toddler bounds forward to latch onto Scott’s knees, and Stiles’ father is finally just there in front of Derek like a sobering splash of ice water to the face. He feels his stomach sink to the welcome mat under his feet.

“How were the girls?” Scott asks quickly before anyone can say anything else.

“Emma has that rash again, your mom thinks,” he says. “She was a little cranky for the nap. Nothing we can’t handle.”

“Noah, hon, this is Derek,” Melissa says, because she seems like the kind of woman who likes to cut to the chase.

Derek sees the exact moment that Stiles’ father realizes who is in front of him—his eyebrows lower and he makes an “o” shape with his mouth. Derek thrusts his hand out, accepting that it’s a ridiculous combination of bad timing and careless thinking to be introducing himself without their common denominator here. Melissa is right that Stiles will surely kill Scott over this.

The man takes Derek’s hand in a firm shake, looking beyond Derek’s shoulder. “I’ve, uh, I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“You as well,” Derek says, even though it’s a lie, an appeasement, the only thing either of them can come up with to say.

Melissa has been steadily laughing under her breath, but as they break the handshake, she loses it again and leans some of her weight onto Noah’s shoulder. “This isn’t an ambush, babe, don’t worry. Scott forgot you were here again and Derek’s just along for the ride, isn’t he?”

Derek shrugs. “Just doing a favor for Lydia.”

“Do you think Lydia knew—“ Scott starts and then furrows his brow in deep thought. Did Lydia know on some cosmic level that Scott would bring Derek along to pick up his kids? That he would surely forget about Stiles’ father and force this introduction? Derek doubts she has the puppet master skills to orchestrate such a colossal fuck up, but he can see how she might have hoped for this outcome. Hadn’t she made a remark last week about the upcoming holidays and the obligations of family dinners? Derek can’t really remember.

Stiles’ dad gives Scott a strange look, but after a few moments, his face relaxes and he crosses his arms. “Well, I had to meet the guy some time.” He says _the guy_ in a way that sounds resentful, like he’s been stewing over Derek’s existence for a while. Derek clears his throat a little.

“Stiles should, uh, probably be here next time,” he contributes.

“Well, you don’t look like trouble.” He smirks a little. “Better than the last one he hid from me. Everyone here tells me you’re with the paramedics.”

“Yes sir. Eight years, going on.”

“You train with the Beacon College or did you go out of state?”

“Out of State. I lived with some relatives in Nevada after high school and stayed put, but I headed back here to work after school.”

This line of conversation dries out quickly, but then Melissa excuses herself from the doorstep to go finish some chore in the house, and she wishes Derek well with quick, motherly kiss on the cheek. “Invite him to dinner, babe,” she calls behind her shoulder as she moves up the stairs.

There’s a sense of _what now_ in the air, and Derek gets the feeling that Stiles would have easily filled the silence with something comfortable. It still is all wrong without him here.

“I have an idea—“ Scott says, hiking the baby girl up higher in his arms. “We can leave now, and just pretend that Derek was never here, and Stiles never has to know anything about this.”

Noah Stilinski gives Scott a look that must have been passed down directly to Stiles because Derek recognizes it—the slightly patronizing, confused, and annoyed squint of his eyes. “Stiles is gonna find out about this, kid, whether any of us tell him or not.” He turns back to Derek. “Look, you tell him to give me a call. We can do it right the second time around, have you over for dinner next week, and all that.”

Derek likes the perfunctory way he suggests this, like he’s slightly glad this has happened, like he’s not as disappointed as he expected to be. It will give them something to talk about the next time they see each other, at least.

***

“You got me a romantic private birthday gift?” Stiles slurs. He had intended on this exchange being a more sober occasion, but drunk Derek felt there was no time like the present for presents. “Aw, babe.”

Derek untangles himself from the bedsheets and half stumbles toward the closet where he’s been keeping the little box. Stiles shoots him a wolf whistle because he’s still stark naked. After the party, they’d attempted some half-drunken sex that they abandoned partway through just to sip from a water bottle and cuddle with the dogs instead. Stiles’ surprise party had been a success, with no one accidentally referring to his age once throughout the night. Derek senses that his mind has been preoccupied with other things, namely being distraught over hearing about Derek’s meeting with his dad.

They haven’t talked about it since Stiles was summoned to the restaurant where the surprise party was taking place, which had been a text from Malia claiming that she had accidentally killed Lydia and needed help dismembering the body and doing away with the evidence.

Derek crawls back into the bed and places the box on Stiles’ chest.

“Happy birthday,” he says, leaning in for a peck.

Stiles giddily sits up a bit and examines the plain blue leather box like it could be an entire game console. “Am I allowed to shake it to find out what it is?”

“Or you could just open it.”

Stiles carefully lifts the lid and takes out what’s inside with surprisingly delicate fingers. “This is…”

“It’s a Beacon Hills Sheriff Department badge. The lady said it was from the forties. I know when the county lines moved in the nineties they switched to the police department and the deputies became officers, but it’s still the history of the place.”

Stiles just stares at the small metal star, runs his fingers over it and turns it in his hands. His voice drops to a soft, near whisper. “Derek, this is amazing.”

“It’s not---“

“Don’t be all _it’s nothing, really_. This is a very intimate expression of your affection and I love it. Really.”  

“Then you’re welcome.” 

Stiles leans in and they kiss softly with the cold metal of the old badge pressing in between both their chests. Stiles pulls away first to rest his head on Derek’s and breathe in the same air. They both still smell vaguely of whiskey.

“My dad was the sheriff, you know.”

“I know.” Derek had found the badge at an antique store downtown and thought immediately that it seemed like an heirloom, something that belonged to Stiles, like a detail on the branch of family tree.

Stiles pulls away and flops back into the pillows, turning his attention back to the badge, running his hands over it like he might have done with his father’s old badge a thousand times growing up. Derek shifts the dogs toward the foot of the bed and moves into the space beside Stiles.

“I can’t believe you met him,” he says, not quite looking directly at Derek, but focusing his eyes on Derek’s leg like it’s a safe zone. “I mean…I just don’t know—“

“You didn’t want me to meet him?” Derek asks. He doesn’t mean for it to sound like he’ll be hurt by the answer. He just wants Stiles to be honest. He wants to understand what goes on in his head.

“I didn’t,” he starts, sounding frustrated. “I didn’t _not_ want you to meet him. Like, I get that it’s weird we haven’t gone to his place yet or that I didn’t bring you to thanksgiving. Normal people start to blend up their lives and know each other’s family at this point, I get that, but I just—“

“You don’t have to explain. It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not. Derek, I just really want him to love you, that’s it.”

“He told me _I don’t look like trouble._ ” Derek runs a hand over Stiles’ forehead, touching his hair.

Stiles laughs and leans into his palm. “Oh, the old man’s losing his touch,” he says, and then he moves to roll his entire body over Derek’s leaning in to kiss the skin above his collarbone, shifting his hips suggestively against Derek’s groin. Derek bites his lip, and even though his head hurts, the hangover on the horizon, he pulls Stiles’ boxers down over the curve of his ass and squeezes hard, pressing him in tighter.

Stiles whispers _trouble_ against his throat.  

***

Stiles’ father might not love him, but three weeks later he helps them move Stiles’ things across town to Derek’s. He rigs a trailer to the back of his car, which at first seemed unnecessary in Derek’s mind— how much would he need to bring since all the essentials at Derek’s place are becoming Stiles’ essentials? But this was a naïve thought. When he arrives to start loading the stuff, of course Stiles’ place is a calamity of boxes on top of piles on top of more boxes, the messes organized by area. Lydia has forced him to accept the _keep, donate, throw away_ system, which as far as Derek can tell, is really more of a _keep, argue about keeping, and refuse to throw away_ system.

The day is long and sweaty, and by the time they get everything out of Stiles’ apartment, the sun is setting and Derek’s place—their place now—is full of more furniture and useless nick knacks than ever before. Stiles always makes fun of him for the minimalism, for the neat couches and sleek tables that look untouched, and the meaningless print art that came with the house when he made the down payment.

Now there is this chair in Derek’s living room—an old, lumpy thing that is worn around the back like a cat once used it as scratch post. There is landscape painting leaning against Derek’s foyer wall, waiting to be hung up. Stiles tells him it was made by one of his old college friends before she moved to Europe. Stiles is suddenly putting things in their new places, framed pictures on the end tables, books on the empty spaces on the shelves, plants on the windowsill, and all of them have a story.

“Shit,” Stiles says as he’s digging through a box of what looks like old textbooks. “I still have to get the key back to the landlord.”

He’s sitting on the floor, unpacking in Derek’s office, where the most shelf space is. The dogs wander around Stiles’, sniffing the new boxes and objects with curiosity. He runs his hands through Zoomer’s coat as he fillips through a photo album.

“Keep working. I’ll run it over.” He bends down to peck him on the mouth before leaving. Stiles, who gets anxious when things aren’t where he can find them, will need to unpack all night before he can sleep. He’d better not stop now.

By the time he gets back to the old apartment, it’s completely dark out, but Derek notices a light is still on in the living room. When he goes inside, Stiles’ father is there, sweeping dust bunnies out of the corners of the now empty room.

“You’re still here,” Derek says. “Anything we forgot?”

The Sheriff—Derek quickly learned it is the name everyone calls him, even his own wife— turns in surprise, sighing as he straightens his back.

“Thought I’d dust up a bit. Meryl’s not quite as mobile as the rest of us,” he says, pointing in the direction of the landlord’s apartment.

“I’m just dropping off her key.”

“Well here,” the Sheriff says, coming forward. “I’ll take it to her. She’ll ask you to stay for tea if you go up there.”

Derek chuckles, hands him the key. “Thanks for, uh, taking one for the team, I guess.”

“Don’t mind a bit. She’s a nice lady, letting Stiles out of the lease early, and all.” With this comment, dangerous territory seems not far behind. Derek tries to not tense up. He leans against the wall and stares out at the space that looks so much bigger without all of Stiles’ things crowding the floor. The Sheriff’s tone changes as he tells Derek, “It feels last week we were driving that U-Haul down from San Francisco.”

Derek clutches his elbow and nods. “I know it’s fast.”

The sheriff leans on the broom, looking him dead in the eye. “I’ve got nothing against you, Derek. I think you’ve been good for him, overall. But that kid will worry me to the grave one day, I swear. And after last year…I just want him to have some stability.”

“He’s got it with me.” Derek feels that it’s true, despite the hiccups, despite the speed of it.

“I’ll hold you to that.” The sheriff looks down at his feet, shaking his head. “He was in rough shape when he transferred here. Rough shape.”

Derek doesn’t say anything because he doesn’t have a point of reference. When he met Stiles, he seemed so sure. He seemed so impenetrable. He was smiles and cool, loose breaths, and someone who took what was tight and sharp, and made it all melt.

“He was heading an investigation. A kidnapping, these twins from the Mission that just vanished. It went on damn near two years…”

“I didn’t know that,” Derek says because part of him wants the Sheriff to stop, because he didn’t know that. He didn’t even know that Stiles worked detective in SF. He’d pictured him as a beat cop on the streets, going through the motions of low stakes daily crimes. But he can see it so clearly, how _obsessed_ Stiles would have been, how he would have given himself over completely to a case, to any case.

“ _I don’t like it when there’s kids involved in all of this,”_ he had once said. It makes sense.

“I’ve worked those cases, back in my day. The kinds where you blink and suddenly…there’s nothing left to your life but the red strings and the crime scene photos on a corkboard.” The Sheriff shakes his head again. “And at the end, you finish it, you solve it, but you’re no hero. And you’re watching them pull two little bodies out of the lake.”

“I didn’t know that,” Derek repeats. He feels hurt suddenly, deep in his chest, crawling down to his stomach. It aches.

“He puts on a good front, I’ll give him that, but he’s not as strong as he looks.”

It feels like a warning, like a question. Derek bites the inside of his cheek thinks about how they’ve been fast, but careful. He thinks about the way that cracked off a piece of his past and handed it to Stiles, and how the weight of it is less now. Stiles has the weight of two dead children perched on his shoulders, and Derek will wait for him to crack that boulder in half, too.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he tells the Sheriff.

The Sheriff gives him a long look like maybe he believes him. After a second, he outstretches his hand for Derek to shake, which he does, solid and steady.

He gets home, to their home, and he seeks Stiles out.  He’s moved to the kitchen now, where he’s kneeling down at the bottom cupboards, trying to get mixing bowls to fit where they won’t. Derek sits next to him and tries to help rearrange, but it’s no use. The cupboards are all full.

Frustrated, Stiles tells him, “I should have downsized more. I fucking _hate_ when Lydia is right.”

“We can downsize my stuff too, you know.”

“You have nice stuff.” Stiles picks up a baking tray that Cora got him for Christmas last year. It’s never been used.

“I think I like your stuff better.”

“We can’t throw out all your stuff and replace it with mine. What if, like, we break up, or I have to move to Sweden or something. I’ll leave and then you won’t have any muffin tins.”

“I think that if we broke up,” Derek says, treading lightly. “Muffin tins would literally be the least of my problems.”

“I’d leave you the muffin tins, anyway. As a token, or whatever. A forget-me-not.”

“That’s beautiful, babe, thanks.”

Stiles laughs and kisses him sloppily on the neck, sinking into his shoulder lower and lower. “I’m exhausted.”

Derek wraps his arms around him gently and kisses his hair. He’ll spend as long as he can making sure Stiles can just rest.

***

One night, he wakes in the pitch darkness to Stiles shifting in the bed. He feels him get out from under the covers quietly, as if he’s trying to not make any noise, and then he’s padding over to the other side of the room. The dogs are snoring on the floor at the foot of the bed, and the sound keeps Derek under in his half-awake trance. He registers a soft beeping noise, and then a click, and then another louder click, but he still doesn’t wake.

He’d been dreaming about Boyd and Isaac and some confusing party scenario, and he still has one foot in that world. But a noise continues to pull him gently out.

Derek hears the door creak open and Stiles’ footsteps softly padding out into the hall. He feels a bit more awake, hearing a shuffling from deep in the house, muted behind the walls. It sounds like there’s someone running the tap in the kitchen. Did Stiles go to get a drink of water? No—he’s still in the hall. Derek can hear him.

And then he’s blinking, awake and confused. He looks over to the other side of the room, where Stiles’ small gun safe sits on the dresser. The door of it is hanging open.

And then a light goes on at the other end of the hall.

And then there’s a high pitched scream and the shattering of glass, and Stiles’ voice deep and loud.

Derek shoots out of bed and flies down the hall, into the kitchen. What he sees is Stiles, lowering his Beacon PD firearm, and across from him at the kitchen island is Cora with her hands up, chest moving rapidly and tears welling in her eyes.

“Stiles, put the gun away—Christ,” he says, touching his arm. Stiles takes two steps back and quickly disassembles it, pulling the clip and the slide out deftly, like he’s done it in his sleep.  

“Derek—what the FUCK?” Cora screams at him.

“I’m—I heard a noise, some movement in the kitchen. I thought it was an intruder.” Stiles puts the pieces of the weapon down on the island, and Cora stares at them like they’re a bomb waiting to go off.

“It’s Cora,” Derek starts. He doesn’t know where to begin. “She has a key, Stiles.”

Stiles steps forward. “I’m so, so fucking sorry. I’m a police officer and it’s just…home invasion training. I swear I’m not a Second Amendment sociopath.”  

Cora finally drops her hands and looks at the both of them. She knows that Derek is dating Stiles and that Stiles is a cop, but that’s about all she knows. “You let boyfriend keep his _gun_ here?”

“I was going to call you,” Derek says, coming around the island to give her a hug. “He moved in a few weeks ago.”

Cora gives Derek a very distanced and brief hug, which is odd for her, because she has never had any boundaries for personal space and usually traps Derek in headlocks and bear hugs at every chance. She looks good, tanned as usual from the Costa Rican sun. Or was she in Chile this time? Her eyes are red and bagged, but her face is full and healthy. She pulls back and looks at him in disbelief, and then her eyes shoot back to Stiles. She’s still a little shell shocked and full of tension. Her arms go around her stomach like she’s still trying to protect herself.

“Did I mention that it’s really nice to finally meet you?” Stiles says, rubbing his hair.

“I guess it’s a story we can tell at the wedding,” she says, deadpan.

Stiles smiles at her, and the tension breaks ever so slightly. He picks up the pieces of his glock and sheepishly leaves the room to put it back in the safe. When he’s out of sight, Cora gives him a slap on the arm.

“First of all,” she whisper-shouts. “How could you fucking not tell me that you _moved in with someone?_ ”

“I—“ Derek tries, but she immediately cuts him off, raising her finger.

“Second of all— I’ve been texting you all night to let you know I’m coming and then I’m greeted with a fucking gun to the head?”

“My phone was dead. And the gun was unloaded?” he tries.

She rolls her eyes. “At least he’s vigilant…you know your dogs didn’t even bark when I came in. How have not been robbed before?”

Stiles comes back with a sweater on and immediately starts to sweep up the glass from the cup that Cora broke. Derek puts on the kettle to make tea and begins heating a pan for eggs. Cora says she’s jetlagged and ravenous.

She actually starts to grill Stiles about the gun as they cook, what bullets it takes,  what model it is, whether he shoots targets.

“I could take you to the range, if you want to blow off a little steam in a controlled environment,” Stiles offers.

“I’m trying to be a pacifist these days, so I better not.”

“Cora’s the pacifist humanitarian that builds houses for Habitat for Humanity in Chile,” Derek says with degree of sarcasm because he’s pretty certain that she’s only been in South America these last four years for the volun-tourism benefits and the cheap tequila.

“It was a community gardening initiative in _Ecuador,_ dumbass. I was kicked out of Habitat last year for fighting the coordinator.”

“Hence the sudden commitment to pacifism.”

At this, she raises her cup of tea.

Stiles serves her the eggs because it’s the one thing he can actually make better than Derek, and she moans when she eats it. Derek sits across from her at the island and watches her eat as though she hasn’t in days.

“So what happened with the gardening group, then? Why’d you leave?”

Cora sets her fork down and finishes chewing. She avoids the question by drinking her tea for a ridiculously long gulp, and when she sets it down, her fingers tighten around the hot mug and go white.

“I fucked up,” she says, shaking her head.

“What happened?” Derek feels his heart quicken, and Stiles moves to sit at the bench next to him. “What’s wrong?”

Cora shakes her head again. “It’s just…this is me officially crawling back to Beacon Hills for help, alright? Rock fucking bottom.”

Stiles looks at Derek with a furrowed brow, worried. Cora finally starts with, “There was this guy—“

“Did he hurt you?” Derek shoots.

“Derek, let her talk,” Stiles says, putting a hand on his arm.

“He didn’t hurt me like that, calm down.” She stand up, hands on her hips, bunching up the baggy sweater.

She paces around in front of the oven for a few moments and Derek starts to wonder what kind of a tangled mess she could be in that would have her so cagey. She’s always been more open than him. Speaking her mind at all possible opportunities, often when it’s inappropriate. It’s why she gets in so many fights. She’s always been loud. Harsh. Mean, sometimes. She’s stronger than him in so many ways. He’s never seen this defeated look on her face before, never seen her so quiet and careful. After a little while, she’s wiping a tear away like she’s angry at it.

“He told me all this shit about how we were going to get married, and he was going to buy a little strip of land outside of Ambato. It was bullshit. He went back to Australia and just left me there. He changed his number, blocked me…from everything. He has a fiancé, or a wife, I don’t even know.”

She lifts up her sweater, bearing her belly. It is swollen and full. A belly full enough that it all sinks in heavy and hard, that there’s little to be done with a belly that big at this point. The look on Cora’s face confirms it.

There is a baby coming.

 “Cora,” he rubs his hand over his beard, feeling suddenly more tired than he’s felt in a while.

“I don’t know what to do.”


End file.
